


Zero Point Two

by Blue_Savannah



Category: Black Mirror, Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Idiots in Love, Modern Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-03-29 15:48:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 29,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13930263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Savannah/pseuds/Blue_Savannah
Summary: Kylo is on fire, his eyes dark, his cheekbones carved from glass, everything about him stunning, raw, captivating.Kylo says, Rey,I love you, and all Rey can think about is that moment on the fire escape, watching a liquid instantly evaporate to a gas. She never knew that she could relate to the crumbling of an entire molecular structure until now.When water changes to a gas, the molecules go flying apart, no longer able to be contained. Love is like that too. It’s like yanking at a loose thread in a sweater, popping open seams, loosening knots, undoing everything that once held you together. At the time, it feels like a beautiful, intimate opening up of yourself to the world — later, you see the tangle of threads at your feet and realize that while once you were whole and self-contained, now you are undone.Undone. That’s a really good word for what she has become, an excellent word to convey how Kylo has robbed her of breath and driven her to her knees.





	1. Chapter 1

Saturday night in New York City, and the world is awash in slick, dark colors: black rain pounding on asphalt, angry yellow car headlights slicing through the night, silhouetted bodies shoving past each other down the streets.

Head down, her hair clinging damply down the back of her neck, Rey Solaria Kenobi teeters on unsteady heels across a crosswalk, oblivious to all the party-going around her. She’s just left her shift at the Carlyle, where she’s been on her feet all day, forcing smiles and fantasizing about a hot bath and endless sleep. Not normally one to complain, this week’s all but killed her. Her bones are leaden with weariness, her jaw aching from forcing smiles at customers. She hasn’t done laundry in over two weeks. There’s a piece of pasta stuck to the inside of her left heel, and a bruise blossoming a blue circle around her elbow from where a drunk guy elbowed past her last night on the subway.

God, how she wants to sleep. She wants to melt into her pillows and bury herself in comforters and forget all about the endlessly exhausting cycle of monotony that is her life. 

And then. The strident sounds of Bowie’s _Starman_ blasting through her eardrums are violently interrupted by her less-than-melodic ringtone.

“What?” she snarls wearily into the phone, only to be greeted by a chorus of raucous male voices and a steady backdrop of noise and static. 

“Please tell me you didn’t forget,” Finn scolds, evidently the most sober of the group. In the background, Rey can hear snatches of Fonsi’s _Despacito_ and someone —Poe? —drunkenly exalting the benefits of chicken tacos.

“I didn’t forget,” Rey sighs,“I’m sorry Finn — I’m going to have to skip tonight. Know it’s last minute but I’m just totally shot. I’ve been on my feet for fourteen hours straight.”

“It’s a party, Rey,” Finn shoots back, disappointed. “It’s supposed to be fun.”

Rey rubs a hand over her forehead, hearing all the subtext in his voice. Traffic whizzes by her, splashing puddles of greasy rainwater. “OK,” she concedes, “is it important to you?”

A door slams on Finn’s end, everything quieting suddenly, like he just stepped outside. “It’s my birthday dinner, and I’d really like my best friend to be here. And even though drunk Poe is hilarious for obvious reasons, my boss is also here, and life kind of sucks without you.”

“What?” Rey squawks, alarmed. “Why is your boss there? Isn’t the guy an ass?” She has heard exclusively terrible things about Kylo Ren, the youngest EVP in Morgan Stanley’s tenured history. In the three years Rey has known Finn, he’s been working consecutive 80 hour work-weeks at Kylo’s beck and call, privy to the man’s insane mood swings and volatile tempers. Rey has never known Finn to cry— except in the past year, and all from work-related incidents. _You need to quit_ , she’d advised only last week, pumping him full of vodka sodas in the kitchen of her tiny apartment in Crown Heights. _No amount of money is worth the kind of verbal abuse this guy needlessly heaps on you._

Finn had downed the alcohol and looked up at her with guileless eyes. _But haven’t you ever had a dream, Rey?_

She hadn’t been able to formulate an appropriate response to that, because the short answer was _yes_. Her dreams were the only reason she was still standing, the reason she’d relocated from the most barren stretch of nowheresville Kansas to the most heavily populated city in the continental U.S. 

_Manhattan means anyone can be anything. Provided it doesn’t suck the life out of you first._

“Yeah,” Finn says harshly, transporting her back to the present. “A total ass. But _Coach_ paired him up with Poe’s cousin, Lydia, and of course she wanted to come, so no one really had a choice, did they?”

“Ah,” Rey replies, everything clicking into place. _Coaches_ , their term for the handheld electronic devices that generate superior algorithms scientifically proven to find your perfect mate, are the kings of the universe — for the obvious reason that they determine who you’ll marry.

None of them really have a say when it comes to weighty matters of fate and destiny. When _Coach_ tells you to jump, your only option is to ask, how high. 

And one of these days, Rey hopes, her _Coach_ will pair her up with somebody great ... or even just _somebody_. Automatically, her fingers reach for the cold steel in her pocket, tracing the familiar outline reverently. It’s been dormant for two years, three months and four days now, not that she’s counting. (OK, so she totally is, she’s kept a tally on the wall of her tiny bedroom…)

With the practice of someone long used to lying to herself, she tries to remember that everything happens for a reason. The system gains insight as participants progress through relationships, or (in her case) lack thereof, and uses the gathered data to eventually select an ultimate compatible other. 

_Trust in the system_ , everyone always says, _it’s proven to work in 99.8% of cases._

But sometimes, Rey wonders if she might be a part of that 0.2%. _Why hasn’t she had a match in over two years?_ She’s seen both Finn and Poe cycle through an endless parade of girls (and guys), while she’s consistently worked three jobs, paid her taxes, grocery-shopped and gone home alone.

“Rey? You coming down?”

“Yeah,” Rey replies, jolting back to reality. “Where are you guys again? Tijuana Picnic? I’ll see you down there in 20.”

She hails a cab and speeds downtown, tracing her fingertips down the frosted windows. When she first came to Manhattan, she’d been dazzled by the constant buzz and asphalt overload, the way everyone had walked with purpose, racing off to big and busy things. At first, the city had promised a world of possibility, all of the bright lights winking and smiling and gleaming down at her, paying special attention to her dreams.

Now though, three years of big city living has worn her thin. She is _weary_. Tired of working three jobs that barely pay rent, of waking up to work texts in the middle of the night, of scribbling manuscripts under the covers like some kind of millennial-J.K-Rowling-wannabe, of cold and dirt and darkness. She is tired of the homeless drunks on the 4 and 5 trains. She is tired of the rats living near her garbage cans. She is tired of waiting outside clubs while bouncers leer at boobs and blonde extensions. Most of all — she is tired of the way loneliness has hollowed her from the inside out. Day in and day out, emptiness pulses in her head, pounds in her heart and beats in the pads of her fucking fingers, reminding her that she is meant to be doing something _better_ , with someone _better_ , only she doesn't quite know who or how to get there.

_Why hasn’t she been matched up? What’s wrong with her? Does no one want her? Is she so unloveable? So undesirable?_

“Miss,” the cab driver says, breaking into the stillness of her thoughts, “here we are.”

Rey snaps her gaze away from the skyline and the elusive pinpricks of light. She’s lonely enough to be thinking of Kansas with a bit of fondness, and that’s a troubling thing. “OK,” she says, “Thank you.”

It's raining harder outside now, a steady drizzle haloed in passing car headlights. Moisture clings to her hair as she hurries inside and unpeels her jacket. Inside, Tijuana Picnic is all light and energy, humming with the sounds of drunken customers, dilating with pulsing strobe. Finn and Poe are sitting at the end of a long, wooden table directly in the center of the room, while a horde of people she doesn't recognize - presumably Finn's work colleagues - grin brightly from a few seats down. Finn and Poe have their arms looped around each other’s waists, Finn’s glassy eyes and far away smile the sure signs that the tequila has started to kick in since the earlier phone convo. 

Biting back a sigh, Rey is “excuse-me’ing” her way towards them through the crowd when someone throws up a sudden high elbow and she goes sprawling. Instinctively landing on her palms to catch the fall, she bites down on her tongue so hard she tastes blood.

“Rey?” She hears Finn’s voice, as though from a great distance.

A pair of dark eyes appraises her scornfully. “So you must be the infamous Rey. From the way Finn raves about you, I’d thought at least you’d be graceful.” 

Down on her knees, her ankles throbbing, her left wrist sporting a tiny trickle of blood, Rey looks up into a face she already knows. Those sharp features and black hair are expected, as is all that leather. 

( _What kind of financier wears so much goddamn leather; it’s not like he’s starting up a rock band_ , she’d sniffed derisively to Finn only a month ago, the same night they’d weeded deep into Kylo Ren’s social media channels to mock pictures spanning a timeline of over five years).

What's not expected is the pull of awareness she feels, low in her stomach and simmering around her waist. Something dark and visceral unfurls in her belly in reaction to his opaque gaze, and she meets his eyes boldly, summoning as much dignity as she can muster while sprawled on the ground of a grimy bar. He’s wearing a _Stones_ T-shirt lightly, like he feels no real allegiance to the band. Lithe muscles ripple the dark tattoo wrapped around his forearm in a language she doesn’t understand: Midwanjontû châtsatul nu asha. His face is not classically handsome, dotted with a constellation of moles across his left cheek, but far better than being good looking, he oozes charisma. 

Mouth gone dry, she gets to her feet, shaking from a combination of awareness and anger that materializes out of nowhere. It is too much. She is utterly exhausted, spent from days of over-work, here only to support Finn, and now this … this man, who has already taken so much from her best friend, is stealing her composure on top of everything else.

Temper flaring, Rey snaps, “And you must be the arrogant, insensitive asshole I’ve heard so much about.”

Kylo blinks at her, unfazed. “You have a piece of spaghetti on your arm.”

She wants to unpeel it off of herself and slap it straight onto his nose, but chooses to brush it to the ground instead. “There. Happy?”

Kylo continues to stare at her, his black gaze melting into something unreadable. “Lydia,” he yells back over his shoulder, his tone caustic, “We’re leaving. I'm not a fan of the company here.”

Lydia, Poe’s cousin whom Rey has only met twice before, tosses a mane of dark hair. She looks like Poe, only with slightly exaggerated features: larger lips, outlined in dark red, big, brown eyes bruised with mascara. “Fuck you, Kylo. I'm having fun.”

“Ah,” Rey purses her lips, gleefully vindictive. “I'm so glad I got to witness this truly heart-warming display of affection. Some of us can only aspire to the paradigm of love you two present to the world.”

If looks could kill, his would literally strip the flesh from her bones. Across the table, Finn has paled under his buzz cut. “Rey,” he calls her, “come sit down. Have a drink.” And to Kylo, “I’m sorry. She’s not normally like this. She’s been going through a hard time lately.”

Furious that he’s speaking on her behalf, Rey marches around the table, tips a shot of tequila to Finn, and downs it in one fluid swallow. “Happy birthday,” she sputters, swallowing back the fire in her throat. “This is for you.” 

She pulls the birthday card from her purse and watches the play of expression across his face as his eyes skim her note. She’s written about how much he has meant to her, about how he is her best friend, about how he has grounded her in this aimless city full of skyscrapers and dirt, where dreams litter the air like cigarette smokes. 

“Thanks Rey,” Finn mutters, his voice gruff. “I love you, too. And thanks for coming. Hey —” he gestures to a passing waitress. “Can we get another round of shots please? Tequila? And a gin and tonic for Rey?”

The waitress, a petite blonde with heavily lined eyes, looks irritated; Finn rallies with a winsome smile. “It’s my birthday,” he tells her, which does nothing to soften the tenseness in her face. And to us, “Be right back, you guys. I’m going to the bathroom.”

Kylo avoids her eyes. “Don’t you want to join your friends?” He gestures towards the other corner of the bar, where Poe and Lydia are convulsed with laughter, wielding bats against a pinata shaped like a starship.

Rey shudders. “Surprisingly, I want to be beating that pinata to shreds only very slightly less than I want to be standing here next to you making terrible small talk.”

He almost smiles. She catches it in the sudden lift of his eyebrows and the tension around the corners of his mouth, though everything else about his face remains impassive. He says, “You’re not how Finn described you to be.”

“Yeah,” she replies, “mean _and_ graceless. That’s me.”

She thinks she’s maybe stumped him because he’s quiet for a second. Their shots arrive and Rey takes two in quick succession, both her’s and Finn’s, because he’s still in the bathroom and she figures he won’t mind. She needs alcohol to face this night out. She needs blurriness and comfort and liquid courage pumping through her veins. “So. How long have you and Lydia been together?” She bites into her lime, tartness flooding her taste buds post-liquor. 

He looks surprised. “A little over two years.”

“And _Coach_ set up guys up?”

He gives her a very strange look. “Obviously.” His tone is icy, his implication clear: _Coach_ sets them all up; they have no choice in the matter.

“What’s your time limit?”

Kylo’s eyes are black and fierce. Pinned on her, his stare has _teeth_. “What is this? An interrogation?”

Rey shrugs, mid-sip of her gin and tonic. Everything is blurring a little around her, and the alcohol makes her bold. Her animosity towards him is fading, a weird, visceral pull flooding in to take its place. “You’re not happy with her. I’m just wondering how long you’re going to keep on not being happy.”

Someone from the bar ahead of them gets up to leave, and Kylo gestures for her to take the free seat. Rey slides onto the stool, rests her elbows on the counter and takes a long, leisurely gulp of gin.

“Another month,” Kylo sighs, “It’s for the best. This is only going to help me find my perfect match down the line.”

“Do you really believe that, though?” Rey asks without thinking.

His head jerks up at her. “The fuck?”

Rey swallows. “Everyone says they’re happy, that _Coach_ helps them to find their perfect match. But _Coach_ also pairs us up in these loveless situations, and we’re just told to endure it, because it means that we’re en route to our soulmate," Her voice trembles with a note of passion. "We have no agency in the matter, and thus we don’t know if we’re ever really loved, because it comes down to destiny instead of choice. But what if you could choose who you loved, and know that you were loved in return? What if we held the power, and we could come together because of decisions _we_ made, instead of dancing to the whim of some random cosmic idea?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Midwanjontû châtsatul nu asha: Taken from the Code of the Sith, "through power, I gain victory"


	2. Chapter 2

Kylo’s fathomless dark eyes, pricked with dots of white, widen. “You’re angry. No, not angry — lonely," he accuses, drawing out the word and making it sound like something _ugly_. "When was the last time _Coach_ set you up with somebody?"

A weight slams into Rey’s chest. It’s not loneliness exactly, more of a soul ache, a deep lack of purpose in her life, and a knowledge that while others might find their soul mates, _she_ won’t. _I work and I pay bills and I go to sleep and then one day, I’ll die. There has to be something more._ She’s angry that Kylo has seen through her so easily, but then, why shouldn’t he? She wears her own pain boldly, splashed across her face in color. In her worst moments, Finn’s labeled her _the walking wounded_.

A memory:

_Warm breezes rifling dirt through the air, cicadas chirruping mournfully, the sticky residue from a spilled Miller Lite coating the backs of her thighs. She is sixteen years old, lying in the back of a pick-up truck underneath Kansas’s star-spangled sky, her shoulder squished next to a boy’s warm body. His name is Theodore Paul, and he is the first boy with whom Coach has ever matched her up._

_“Don’t take it the wrong way. It’s not that you’re the worst option,” Theodore is sighing mournfully, “It’s just that I thought Christina and I … well, you see the way she looks at me. We’re meant to be. This is just an experiment for Coach to configure our dating profiles.”_

_Rey ravages her lip with her teeth._ Experiment _is a new one; she hasn’t yet heard herself referred to in that way. She thinks about the mother she never knew, who dumped her on the steps of an orphanage as a newborn, about the father who (she assumes, anyway), never stopped to think about the teenager he may or may not have impregnated one hot, sticky July night. Since then, Rey’s whole life has been a collection of blurred rear view mirrors (people who never stopped to look back), families (strange, adoptive ones) who purse their lips as she sits at their dinner tables and eats their food, and assorted paraphernalia (books, backpacks, clothes) that aren’t really hers. She is unwanted. She is unloveable. She is forgettable. She is disposable._

_This situation is no exception._

_“I understand,” she tells Theodore, her voice coming out gravelly and solemn. “But we have no choice. Coach put us together, and we have to do what Coach says.”_

_“I know. I’m sorry, Rey,” Theodore says, as sorry as any horny teenage boy can be. His fingers tangle at the waistband of her jeans. His lips graze the sensitive skin of her neck. “I’m sorry that it has to be this way. Maybe after you, Christina and I can be together. And then you’ll find your soulmate too.”_

_She waits to feel something, anything, but her whole body has gone numb. She has become disconnected to her body. From a high, high distance, she floats somewhere up in the clouds, watching a teenage girl sprawled in a truck bed, a blond boy pawing at the shoulders of her tank top._

_She thinks the girl is crying, but she can’t tell. (Up here in the sky, anything is possible)._

“Rey?”

She jerks back to reality with a thud, Tijuana Picnic swimming into focus. Poe and Finn and Lydia are still laughing uproariously as they batter a birthday pinata. Kylo is still standing, one shoulder propped against the bar, staring at her with obsidian eyes and a strange expression on his face.

“I’m not lonely,” she says shortly, responding to his earlier statement. “I just need another drink.” She can feel the alcohol pulsing through her veins, but it’s clearly not enough to stem the pain from seeping in through the cracks.

Kylo buys her another gin and tonic, and refills her water glass. “Keep the change,” he tells the bartender, magnanimous in his wealth. The bar is starting to thin out a little around the edges, with a free stool opening up next to her. He slips onto the seat beside her, and Rey's first instinct is to shrink back. He is so … big is not the right word. He just sucks all the air out of the room. He is like a snake, but not the sneaky kind who lies in camouflaged wait for unwitting prey to stumble on by. He is brightly patterned, black, yellow, red, venomous, everything about him spelling _danger_. You get bitten by him — it’s your own damn fault.

“What do you do, Rey?”

“For work?”

His mouth tips. “Yes, for work. And what do you do for fun? What do you do in your spare time? I’m curious about the girl who has such definite opinions about how _Coach_ has ruined all of our lives.”

Her stomach flutters a little at that. She tries to summon revulsion and disgust — this is Kylo Ren, financier extraordinaire, who has made Finn’s life a living hell for years — but all she can see are those beautifully shaped eyes, the muscles under the leather jacket, and way his lips look when he says, _I’m curious about you_.

Rey rationalizes away the attraction. She is just drunk. He is also Lydia’s boyfriend. _For another two months anyway_ , her treacherous mind reminds her. _It's a mandatory courtship, as they all must be._ “Do you know,” she laughs, deliberately evasive, “that in the past minute we’ve been talking, exactly 251 babies have been born worldwide? And in the 60 seconds that these few hundred new mothers have been screaming and pushing and bringing life into the world, all I’ve done is drink gin,” she waggles her straw suggestively.

Kylo’s eyes are fire. “Do you want to make a baby, Rey? Is that what it’ll take to make you feel productive in life?”

Her heart jumps to her throat. “OK. Let’s go back to the work question, please.”

“I thought so.” He’s laughing at her, and it’s _amazing_. The scary, tattoo’ed, black-eyed man who has screamed at Finn and fired countless employees for minor offenses is _amused. By her._

“I … uh, I’m a hostess. At the Carlyle. I also work at Ann Taylor. And I do some part time copy writing work. I lead a very exciting, very glamorous life.”

He doesn’t react. Only his body language betrays him. “Three jobs?”

Rey squirms. “Sometimes I do some odd babysitting and dog walking on the side. Hey,” she adds, immediately defensive, “not all of us work with multi-million dollar clients on a daily basis. It was either this or Kansas.”

“Billionaire clients," he corrects. And then, "You’re from Kansas?”

 _Dear god_. “OK, either I’m going to need another drink, or you’re going to need to stop asking me questions because I’m feeling uncomfortable even through my buzz.”

“Just one more?” Kylo holds up a finger, his expression innocent. 

“Drink or question?”

“Question.” His mouth quirks. “I’m not trying to inebriate you. You’re the one with the gin addiction. What do you love to do the most, of your three jobs?”

“That’s easy,” Rey slides forward, her dress edging up her thighs. His eyes flicker from her legs to her face. “I love to write. Copy-writing is a step in the right direction, but I really want to be a novelist. I’ve been working on my current project for almost two years now.”

“And what is it about?”

“That’s two questions.”

“That’s a bonus question. I'm allowed a freebie.” Kylo is suddenly close to her, his breath misting the air. The barstools are a buffer of wood between them, everything else pulling them together.

“Fine,” she downs the rest of the gin and pushes the glass back on the counter. Her cheeks are warm, the walls of the bar swimming a little. “It’s a novel. It’s a sci-fi fantasy, about unlikely heroes coming into their own, and battling for galactic domination.” She deliberately doesn’t tell him about the heroine, borne on a desolate, sandy planet, the inspiration for which may or may not have been derived from her own childhood back on Kansas. “It involves swashbuckling and murder and lots of heroics and angst. It’s mostly done, but I haven’t been able to come up with a name for it.”

“Huh,” Kylo purses his lips. “Galactica?”

“Yeah, no. I considered Interstellar, but that's -"

“- Already a movie. Now you’re just plagiarizing.” Kylo squints, thoughtfully. “Star Wars?”

“Huh.” Rey fidgets, disconcerted by just how much she likes that idea. 

“Rey!” She turns, distracted by the heavy hand on her shoulder. Finn has finally disentangled himself from the pinata battering long enough to come back and check up on her. She’s feeling more than just blurry now, the gin a giant body cushion, her veins slithering with volumes of clear liquid, and maybe Finn can tell, because his eyes look tense. “Time for you to go.”

“Go?” She swivels, waving a hand in Kylo’s general direction. “I was just talking to my new friend here.”

“I’m getting you an uber.”

Lydia reappears over Kylo’s shoulder, her hair immaculate, her lipstick pristine. Rey knows she cannot compete with her. Lydia probably glided through her college years, trailed by a legion of worshippers. She probably sported an unseasonable tan all through winter, and straddled the thin line between sexy and slutty without ever venturing into the _regret_ territory. Rey dislikes her until she remembers that Kylo doesn’t like her either. When her sudden enmity disappears in the wake of this thought, it makes her uneasy.

“Let’s go.” Finn says, one hand hot in hers, the other gentle on her back. “I’m going to take you home.”

From somewhere very far away, Rey hears Kylo say that it’s OK, that he can take her home, that he wants to make sure she’s safe. The only thing she remembers after that is vomiting spectacularly across Finn’s new pair of Yeezy’s.

++++

Sunlight splashes through the windows of Ann Taylor, illuminating the artfully sheer dress arrayed across the mannequin in a rainbow of golds and pinks. Another mannequin lies toppled in the store display, anxiously awaiting a new blouse and pleated trousers, one of spring’s supposed hottest fashions. It’s a late Sunday afternoon in the city, the first warm day after a seemingly endless sprawl of winter and ice, and Fifth Avenue is crawling with pedestrians newly emerged from hibernation.

“Um,” Rey surveys the 40-something woman posing in front of her and debates whether or not to tell the customer her true feelings on tulle. “The most important thing is — how do you feel in the outfit?”

“I feel great,” the woman tells her. She twirls in front of the full length mirror, her fingers parsing through the yards of fabric. “This is almost as good as botox.”

“Wonderful,” Rey replies, long desensitized to these types of women. "I can take you up at the register whenever you’re ready.”

She can see the edges of Central Park through the frosted store windows. The street vendors are back in full force, and people are already lining up to buy horrifyingly over priced gyros and hotdogs. Green buds leaf the trees, and riots of pink blossoms climb through the bushes and sprawl across the lawn. Rey can’t wait for her shift to end (at five). She can’t wait to go out to the park, and lose herself as an anonymous person in the huge touristy throngs. Anonymity is one of the great perks of city living. Sometimes it even dulls the edge of her loneliness a little.

_You’re lonely._

Desperate for a distraction, she busies herself with a tangle of pearl studded necklaces lying next to the register. Focused on unwinding the threads of jewelry, she’s startled by the door chime. And then she looks up and stabs herself a little with the stray edge of gold clasp.

It’s not _him_ , even though she thought it was at first. His shoulders are too narrow, his face too angled, his hair too long, though the coloring is the same, and that’s what startled her. Besides, Kylo exudes magnetism, something this man clearly doesn’t have. Even blindfolded, Rey thinks she’d still be able to pull Kylo out of a lineup based on feelings and sensation alone. She’d never felt such … raw energy, such a visceral pull to another human. Before him, she hadn’t known attraction could be like that, that it could leave a rippling trail across skin and sinew that tightened your breathing and sped up your heart rate. Of course, she’d also managed to vomit noisily across Finn’s shoes and make a complete idiot of herself in the process, so it wasn’t like Kylo would remember her … fondly. 

And yet — that night at Tijuana Picnic had been over two months ago now, and Finn had mentioned offhand that Kylo still asked about her. _What did you guys talk about for so long,_ Finn had quizzed her suspiciously, _Kylo seemed… well as happy as Kylo can be, I guess. He’s been less miserable than usual. And he told me to tell you, hello. And he hopes you’re doing well._

_Hello._

“Excuse me?” The woman with the tulle skirt a mile long positions it across the counter, appraising Rey with a critical eye. “I meant to ask you earlier, but do you cleanse at all? You look fantastic. I just started a new program but I’m about ten pounds off my goal weight.”

“Oh,” Rey replies, taken aback. She doesn’t cleanse, and she also doesn’t know how to tell the customer that her weight comes at the expense of abandonment issues and generalized heartbreak. She almost says, _you don’t want to be like me_ , but stops herself in time, and accessorizes her words with a toothy smile. “I don’t, but you look great.”

She’s in the process of ringing up the skirt when something else starts ringing too. “Ma’am, your phone,” Rey says, but the women is pointing back at her, eyes wide. Rey is confused. She always keeps her phone on silent at work, but her pocket is chirping incessantly, the sound continuing to grow louder. 

It takes a full five seconds for realization to come crashing in on her. She’d almost forgotten her _Coach_ still works, it’s been so long. The steel is cool in her palms, immediately falling silent at the touch of her fingertips. She flips it open, and …

 _His_ name, glaring up at her in neon red.


	3. Chapter 3

“What’s wrong?”

Ashen faced, Kylo shoves his beeping _Coach_ back into his pocket, while his mother observes him, eagle-eyed. “You just got a new setup? With a girl?”

“No, with an antelope,” he snaps, falling back on sarcasm to cover his roiling emotions. _Old habits die hard_. “Yes, of course, with a girl!”

His mother, New York Senator Leia Skywalker-Solo, is too well-bred to smirk, but her lips curve upwards in the faintest impression of mockery. “What’s wrong? Is she ugly? Is it another bad set-up, so soon after Lydia?”

“Lydia wasn’t ugly. That wasn’t the problem with us. And Rey isn’t…” His mouth dries up. _Coach_ provides pictures of all set-ups, alongside contact numbers and personal information, but he doesn’t need this watered-down, pixelated version to remember Rey as she was, that night at the bar. _A waterfall of deep, brown hair. Vivid, endless eyes._ Her heart-shaped face implied delicacy and fragility; in actuality, she was anything but. Even drunk, he’d found her to be emotionally expressive, razor sharp and so wildly, electrically alive that she dimmed everything else around her. 

Kylo sighs. Now that he’s picturing her, there isn’t room for anything else in his head. He is thinking stupid, sappy things like, _I can’t believe something good actually happened to me_ and _I should call her immediately._ What he _should_ do, rationally, is wait to call her until he gets back to his apartment. He _should_ wait to call her until he thinks of something impressive and intelligent to say. He _should_ wait to contact her until he has some idea of whether or not she’s happy to be matched up with him.

And if she’s not happy…

His rage, these days carefully banked by years of expensive therapy, simmers under the surface of his skin. Therapy pacified him with a lot of Freudian accolades, but his work colleague Snoke taught him that every time he feels himself getting angry, he should mentally count to ten before he says anything he might regret later on.

The end result is that he does a lot of counting. Especially around his mother.

Behind Leia, blue and gold drapes sway in the gentle breeze. Today is the first warm day they’ve had in months, warm enough that Leia has thrown open the doors to their penthouse balcony, unveiling a stunning vista of Central Park. Far below them, children and dogs and tourists frolic amid swirls of grey and blue and grey. Leia’s is one of the most coveted apartments in the whole city, typically accessible only for oil tycoons and children of Asian billionaires. Kylo’s family is neither — but then, his mother and uncle are celebrities in their own right.

Infamous for being the children of the late, great Anakin Skywalker, Leia and Luke were credited with implementing the first _Coach_ prototypes into mainstream, societal existence. Now, of course, _Coaches_ are mandated for citizens across the globe, but back then, they were considered cutting edge. 

What happened was this: over a hundred years ago, Anakin Skywalker fell in love. It was a love so fierce and wild and desperate that it scorched the galaxy — but when Anakin’s wife died giving birth to Luke and Leia, Anakin lost his mind to grief. He embarked on a killing spree, violent and bloody and evil enough to vaunt him straight to the forefront of history’s worst known serial killers. 

Eventually, he was caught and given the electric chair, but not before his victims numbered in the hundreds: bloody, awful corpses with their eyelids singed shut, their tongues peeled back and their fingernails painstakingly ripped off. (Kylo has seen the pictures, clipped and filed in an innocuous manila folder that Leia pretends doesn’t exist. He wonders sometimes if just seeing the images as a child was enough to fuck him up, but then he thinks, _maybe I’ve always been a little fucked up)_.

Still reeling from the awful tragedy, Luke and Leia atoned for the sins of their father via various political paths, actively seeking out reform. Love, they argued, was a dangerous, volatile concept that turned even the best men bad ( _case in point_ ). To avoid anything like a repeat of Anakin’s rampage, they pushed the implementation of a high-tech product that was able to accurately quantify a person’s likes, dislikes, personal history and sexual preferences well enough to match them up with the “perfect” mate. While love did often blossom from these matches, _Coaches’_ premeditated algorithms carefully negated risks of volatile partners. 

_Coaches_ had eliminated choices, but they’d also successfully eliminated domestic abuse and divorce rates. Matches had proven to be successful 99.8% of the time. 

Leia and Luke rocketed to superstar status. They dripped in jewels and gold and international acclaim. Ben Solo skulked around in his private school uniform and changed his name to Kylo Ren as soon as he was legally able. He wanted nothing to do with his perfect, privileged life and his savior-status family members. He pursued a career in finance because the ruthless nature of hedge funds sated his inner base nature. He avoided his mother and his uncle as much as he could. Except for these inevitable Sunday afternoon sessions. 

“Well,” Leia says, her words double edged, “whether she’s ugly or not, just remember to be grateful that we have _Coaches_ to keep us on the straight and narrow.”

Kylo doesn’t want to be on the straight and narrow. He wants to roll around on the rocks and douse the well-lit trail in gasoline, to watch the stupid pedestrians go up in flames. He bites his tongue hard enough to draw blood.

“You should bring her around,” Leia’s smile is edged in intention, “I’d like to meet her.”

“We’ll see.” Kylo doesn’t smile, but he still thinks he deserves a medal for his self-restraint.

++++

He’s on the 6 train, stuck underground somewhere between Union Square and Grand Central when his cell vibrates against the leg of his pants.

He flicks it open. _Meals are optimal times for dates, or so I’ve heard. Dinner is the closest meal. Want to do dinner?_

While his heart — broken, deadened thing that it is — doesn’t quite beat erratically, it does make a little skipping motion. He types back, _It would seem that destiny decrees it._

Reu sends him back a cyber frowny face. _Not destiny. Choice. We have to fight for the few choices we do have. And I’m choosing dinner. With you. At Dutch Boy Burger._

_The place in Crown Heights?_

_Yeah. They have spiked milkshakes!_

_Fuck. I’m all the way over in fucking midtown east._

_Don’t fucking curse. Besides, I’m worth it._

Kylo blinks. A real, rare smile unfolds across his face. 

To his left, a homeless man snores erratically, his feet bare and black underneath threadbare jeans. The smell of rancid milk wafts through the car.

Kylo doesn’t even care. He's in such a good mood that he gifts the man a dollar.

++++

To Rey, everything looks different when Kylo Ren walks into the room. In this particular situation, Dutch Boy Burger suddenly feels smaller. The sound of the pinball machines get further away, the overhead lights soften, the smells of cooking oil and sizzling bacon intensify. Quite literally, Kylo sucks the air from the room, robs it from her lungs.

Rey shivers, standing up to greet him. She knows what this is. Dopamine is the chemical reaction in the brain that triggers physical attraction. Coincidentally, it’s also the chemical released by nerve cells when snorting coke or meth. To recap — falling in love is the equivalent of doing drugs. To recap further — she is not falling in love. Or doing drugs. 

“I ordered you a chocolate shake,” Rey confesses, as he hugs her. His arms around her body elicit little frissions of electricity all across her skin. “Fair warning, it also has bourbon in it. I thought bourbon was the most manly option."

“Sure,” Kylo agrees, his smile sharp and ferocious. He is lingering next to her, like he wants to claim her. “The pink straw is a nice touch.”

She shrugs, sitting back down again. She is nervous, her heart crashing into her ribs. She has not been on a date in ages. But this is … a mandatory date. But she wants it? She doesn’t know what she wants. Sixty years ago, there was a clear cut _if you like someone, then ask them out,_ while now there is a sleek, silver machine that chirrups in a bird voice and says, _I demand you to date this person and if you don’t, then terrible things will happen._

 _Times change._

A girl with an eyebrow piercing and purple streaked hair takes their order. Kylo gets a BLT and Rey asks for a bacon blue burger, curly fries and onion rings. She doesn’t react to the flicker of amusement behind Kylo’s eyes. She is hungry, goddamnit, she hasn’t been on a date in over two years, and she is _celebrating._

The waitress leaves, and Kylo says, “Tell me about yourself.”

Her heart sounds like this: boom-crash-boom-crash-crash. She swallows. “Kenobi, Rey. Five foot seven. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Average build —”

He interrupts, “There’s nothing average about you, Rey.”

Her cheeks are fire. “What do you want to know, Kylo? I’m not very good at this.”

He cocks his head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean _Coach_ hasn’t set me up on a date in over two years. And before that, dates were scarce too."

“And why do you think that was the case?”

“I … maybe I just always felt like I was never good enough. Like I wasn’t a good choice to date, and maybe I subconsciously communicated that to _Coach_ , I don’t know.”

“And why in the actual _fuck_ would you think of yourself that way?”

She swallows. “Are you aware that you do this … this interrogatory thing? I think it’s a byproduct of your job. Stop it, please. It’s intimidating.”

Kylo half smiles. He leans back in his chair and adopts a more casual pose: legs crossed, hands folded. “Better?”

“God, no. You look like you’re posing.”

The smile jerks from his mouth, like he didn’t mean to set it free. “Please. Tell me something about yourself. Anything you want.”

Rey picks at the tablecloth. “You have to be more specific than that. Do you know how hard it is to just pluck a random fact about yourself from thin air? And the pressure to pick something that provides the perfect mix of scandal and safety … Do I go with something light and happy like _I have three cats named after the Beatles_ , or do I spring straight for the weird and twisted like _I have a demented twin brother?_ ”

“Do you? Have three cats or a twin brother?”

“Unfortunately, neither.”

Kylo leans forward on his elbows. With his sleeves rolled up, Rey can see how his forearms are ridged with light musculature that extends up to his shoulders. That stark, black tattoo is on full display again. “Tell me something _real_ ,” he counters.

Their food arrives: golden brown bread and bun, burger meat cooked to perfection, curly fries crispy and lightly seasoned, just the way she likes them. Rey rolls her eyes in mock pleasure as she bites deeply into her burger, and wipes a smear of cheese from the corner of her mouth.

She chews her food as she considers Kylo’s question. “I am a feelings person,” she finally says, “I feel everything very deeply. I am a cry-because-it-hurts, love-because-it-matters, rage-because-it’s-wrong person. I guess I mean to say that I do not suffer in silence.” A glob of ketchup drips onto the checked tablecloth pattern. “And that is because I've been on my own for the majority of my life. I guess in some ways that made me strong, but it also made me want to live to the fullest.”

Kylo’s stare is raw, and hungry for something beyond food. His voice is raspy. “I already know how strong you are. I can sense it in you.”

Rey looks away. “What does your tattoo mean?”

“This?” He grazes it with his palm, and it makes Rey imagine his fingertips on her flesh. Her skin prickles with goosebumps. “It means, through power, I gain victory.”

The lights around them get darker, static swallowing all softness between them. “That’s kind of … I don’t know … kinda mercenary, no?”

He is unperturbed. “It is a reminder that power and strength are the gods I live by.”

++++

After dinner, they huddle awkwardly on the street. Rey is mentally calculating what she believes to be an appropriate walking distance between them, when Kylo seizes her wrist, pulls her against the side of the building and kisses her.

It is instantaneous, a match lit flare, a chemical reaction. Molten lava replaces the blood in her veins. Her brain says _oh._ Her body hums _so this is what it’s supposed to feel like._ Rey shuts out the silver crescent moon, the squeal of tires, the slap of shoes on the street. Nothing exists beyond _this_. Kylo’s fingers band lightly around her upper arm, his tongue sighs into her mouth, his free hand pulls her closer, digs into her hair and she _wants_ it. She wants _him_. She wants to rip her own carefully-erected boundaries down around her ears and give into the temptation of skin on skin. Her body is _screaming_ for it. Distantly, the logical part of her brain puzzles over the heightened level of physical passion between them, something she thought _Coach_ was supposed to cancel out.

She realizes she’s never _wanted_ a man like this before.

Kylo’s mouth disengages from hers. His teeth move to her earlobe. He whispers, “Come home with me.”

Rey’s pulse crashes in places it absolutely does not belong. Outwardly, her body is frozen; inwardly, it is heaving and flailing and writhing, a drowning sailor. She jerks free of Kylo to stare at his face. Lust paints his black eyes liquid, and twilight drapes a sheen over the sharpness of his features. He is raw and unfiltered and so, so beautiful to her. 

She is a dirty, rotten liar who will burn in hell for her perjury. She says, “Kylo, I want to take it slow.”

Kylo exhales noisily, his desire for her oozing from her pores. His hands rise to cup her face. “If that’s what you want. We can do whatever you want.”

++++

Rey goes home alone, with bruised lips and bruised hips and the rest of her body aching to be bruised too. She can’t sleep. Cocooned in her comforter, her mind replays the evening’s events in a seamless video montage. She punches her pillows angrily. She regrets everything. She could be naked, tangled up in Kylo’s arms right now, and instead her body is fuming, suffocated with pent-up desire. She is confused by her very poor life choices.

On the windowsill, her phone buzzes with a text from Kylo. _Goodnight cyar’ika._

Rey frowns at that, easing back into bed. _Cyar’ika, cyar’ika, cyar’ika._ Why is that word so familiar? It takes a while for the memory to return to her: a borrowed textbook in history class, a hushed tone, a warning of what happens when you love too much and too hard. 

_Cyar’ika_ had been Anakin Skywalker’s endearment of choice for his wife, Padme.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cyar'ika: darling, beloved, sweetheart [Mandalorian]


	4. Chapter 4

It happened like this: first, there was the botched deal at work. Then, the stilted phone call conversation with his uncle Luke that set his teeth on edge. On his way home, he’d listened to a podcast about a kidnapping case way out in Arizona that brought back all the old, painful memories. 

And now, it is 7:30PM on Friday night and Kylo Ren is drunk. Not the cute buzz of a few drinks either, but the awful and total obliteration that comes from pounding whiskey and trying to drown out pain. 

A memory:

_He is nine years old when he is abducted from one of Luke and Leia’s state meetings, when he is tied up and pushed into the trunk of a navy Cadillac that smells like weed and stale food and … something worse._

_They drive until evening, when his captors open up the trunk and he gulps in wild, hungry breaths of the dusky air. It is late fall, frost edging the branches of the trees, the hillsides a riot of color, the world on fire._

_They take him to an abandoned barn, somewhere far upstate. They drink tequila. They lay bets on how much ransom money New York Senator Leia Skywalker-Solo will pay to get her son back in one piece._

_One of Kylo’s captors holds a Glock to his head and threatens to pull the trigger. His ragged nails dig into the back of Kylo’s neck, leaving fingermarks. His eyes hold more gray than any other color. Kylo may still be a child, but he is not afraid. He is imagining the ways in which he will make this man suffer as soon as this is all over._

_His chance comes sooner than he thinks it will. Two of the men go out for supplies, leaving only one behind. Kylo’s wrists are black and bloody and bracketed with bruises. He breaks two of the fingers on his left hand wriggling free of his bonds — and then he sneaks up behind the man and pockets his gun. He shoots him in the fleshy part of both legs and watches him scream and curse and bleed out._

_The blood spatters the walls and dribbles in dusty pools around the floor. When the police find Kylo only an hour later, he’s rocking cross legged next to the body, his white face streaked red and brown with someone else’s dried blood._

_Leia puts him in extensive trauma therapy, but he never tells anyone how bad the nightmares get. He never tells anyone about the lack of remorse he feels over killing another human being._

_He knows better than to talk about how much he enjoyed watching someone else suffer._

++++

“And you actually like him?” Finn asks, incredulous, wiping his mouth and setting down his empty Heineken with a wet slap. “Really? Kylo Fucking Ren? This isn’t another one of _Coach’s_ sick jokes?”

Rey shrugs. _Like_ is too small a word to encompass how she feels about Kylo. His presence hums in her subconscious like an extra, unwanted vein. She remembers how she felt when he kissed her, how her whole body had lit up, how her nerve endings had flared and sparked at every point of contact between their bodies.

In the farmlands of Kansas, they say that time can stand still, that it is only measured by the seasons and the crop cycles. Time ceases to be linear in a place where the sun is always high, the ground dusty, and the horizon constant. People from Kansas stay where they are — they don’t leave and they don’t change. In New York City, Rey had felt that she lived in the present for the first time. 

But when Kylo Ren kissed her, she saw her life in future tense. 

“I mean, we get along really well,” Rey replies, topping off her wine glass with another generous pour. The two of them are sitting together on the high-tops in Rey’s tiny kitchen, their bare feet swinging an inch off the floor. 

“I don’t get it. How does anyone get along with Kylo?” Finn wonders aloud, cracking open another Heineken from the freezer. “The man’s impossible. Have you heard Lydia talk about him? I mean, _Coach_ put them together for two years, and to hear her talk about him, the man’s a complete monster.”

Rey doesn’t give a fuck what Lydia says. She may be Poe’s cousin, but she’s still the kind of girl who wields her beauty like something sharp and dangerous, who’s used to to driving men to their knees. Rey suspects at least some of Lydia’s venom derives from Kylo’s utter indifference to her charms, something that makes her smile inwardly. 

She swishes around a mouthful of Pinot Grigio and considers her answer before she speaks. “We have certain...similarities,” she settles on saying. _He’s damaged_ , is what she doesn’t say, _damaged like me_. Here's the thing about understanding: it cuts both ways. Somehow, Kylo Ren, one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the whole city, feels just as lost and lonely as she does. 

Finn cocks an eyebrow. “I’m happy you’re happy. But Rey, please just be careful. I think he’s dangerous.”

“Thanks _dad_.” 

He ignores her playful sarcasm. “How long do you two have, anyway?”

Something hollow cracks open in the pit of Rey’s stomach. She trails a fingernail down the side of her wine glass, unwilling to admit that she’s been too afraid to look.

For all pairings, _Coaches_ also provide expiration dates, often with no rhyme or reason. You might be paired with someone for two years or two days; but whatever the timing, it’s out of your control. Soulmates are the only exception, upon which _Coach_ will alert you the day before. Rey has only seen that happen once before — back in high school, when the blonde girl sitting in front of her got beeped in the middle of history class.

 _Tomorrow, you will meet your perfect match_ , Coach had enunciated in perfect, crisp syllables. _You are allowed the time to say goodbye to only one ex. Is there anyone you would like to see before meeting your final match?_

The girl had shrieked, throwing up her notebook in the air, while the rest of the class had whooped appreciatively. Even their teacher, irrepressibly cross Mr. Tyler, had cracked a rusty smile. 

Rey had cheered along with everyone else, but life had already swallowed up too much of her innocence. She remembers thinking bitterly, _I will never have that, that will never happen to me._ In this endlessly tired and dusty world, there is no relief left for someone like her.

She swallows hard. “I only know that he’s not my soulmate. I don’t know the exact timeline of anything else.”

Finn starts laughing. “No shit! Can you imagine if you had to be stuck with Kylo for the rest of your life?”

Rey doesn’t answer. Quick, reactive moisture burns at the inside of her eyes. “He’s not as bad as you think he is,” she grinds out, defensive.

Finn’s gaze is dark and searching. “You like him,” he accuses, his voice pulling out the words to make them sound almost dirty.

Rey’s phone buzzes against her thigh before she can respond. “Speak of the devil,” she quips, seeing Kylo’s name flash across the screen.

_Can you come over?_

Finn leans over her shoulder to read the text. “I thought you didn’t do booty calls.”

Her cheeks flame. “I don’t. This isn’t a booty call. We’re matched. Anyway, you’re right. I’m not responding to this. It’s 10PM on a Friday night. I’ll just talk to him tomorrow.”

“Good girl.” Finn nods approvingly as she puts her phone aside. To distract her, he launches into a story about some of Poe’s recent antics — something involving a cactus plant, a cute receptionist, and Poe’s trademark sweet talking.

Rey tries to pay attention, but her phone is just lying there on the table, hot and accusatory, only an arm’s length away. Midway through Finn’s monologue, she gives in to temptation and flips to her messages.

_I texted you, now it’s your turn to text me back. That’s how a conversation goes._

_Here’s my number in case you forgot it. Or lost it._

_Rey._

_Please. Rey, please._

_I need you._

++++

Kylo thinks he’s dreaming when someone buzzes up to his apartment and says, _it’s me_ with Rey’s voice. She’d texted him that she was coming, but he’s so far gone, he can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. For the past half hour, all he’s been able to do is lie in his bed and watch the walls dance and shake.

“Rey?” Somehow he stumbles to the door and manages to throw it open. 

“Hi,” she says, looking at him from the hallway with her huge, rainforest eyes. Her dark hair is pulled into three braids, a few wisps pulling free to frame her face. He watches the pulse bob at her throat as she takes him in. “You’re drunk.”

He doesn’t bother to deny this. “I need you,” he says instead, plaintive and whiny, reaching for her. “Please.”

She meets his embrace halfway, stumbling into his apartment, running her fingers through his hair and kissing his forehead chastely. Fuck, he doesn’t want _that_ , not when his feelings for her are a roiling, hazy nest of longing. “Come here,” he whispers huskily, his impatient fingers shrugging off her jacket, pushing down the straps of her tank top. He can see the freckles dusting the tops of her pale shoulders, the way her lips quiver when he is this close to her, the way she sighs when he lowers his mouth to her neck. He moves his lips up to kiss her, and it’s a filthy kiss, all tongue and urgency, no gentleness. He kicks the door of his apartment closed and walks her backwards into his kitchen, their lips connecting, her arms circling his neck. He pushes her onto the fancy granite countertop — when he’d spent an hour deliberating whether to go with black or white, he hadn’t been envisioning it for _this_ particular use, not that he’s complaining. He finally chose a swirling design of dark blues and grays, and it’s never looked better than it has at this exact moment: with Rey Kenobi straddling it and staring at him with deep, fathomless, adoring, come-hither eyes.

He wants her more than he’s ever wanted another woman before. He wanted her the minute he first saw her walk into _Tijuana Picnic_ , all bee stung lips, bright eyes and fierce, fiery retorts. He wants — _Oh_. He unzips her ankle boot, holding her foot in his hands as the shoe hits the ground heel first. The second boot joins the first, while his hands roam up her ankles, her calves, her thighs, cupping both her hips. Energy sparks and flares where their bodies meet, all-consuming and possessive. _Dzwol shâsotkun_.

When he was twelve, his father Han Solo tried to impart a rare piece of wisdom about the opposite sex. “You’ll have needs,” he’d started off awkwardly, not even looking at his son, tinkering away on whatever piece of machinery he was working on at the time, “And there might be a really pretty girl. And you might like her, and you might want to take certain… liberties. But it’s important to remember that girls can be scared, especially young girls. So be respectful. Take the time the figure out what she likes.”

“The way you figured out what mom liked?” Kylo had interrupted frostily. His parents had been separated for a little over three years by that point. Everything had crumbled shortly after his kidnapping, with Leia and Han erupting into frequent fights over whose fault everything had been. Things ended with Leia flinging a wrench at Han’s head, and both of them finally voicing the popular opinion that while they’d always be friends, maybe they just worked better when they led separate lives.

The tips of Han’s ears flared red. “Look kid, your mother’s a special case,” he amended. “All I’m saying is that no means no, OK? Don’t ever force a girl to do something she doesn’t want to do.”

His hands, so confident and deft with planes and trains and machinery, looked big and awkward as they clapped his son’s shoulder. 

Snatches of that long-ago conversation filter through Kylo’s consciousness as he stares at Rey. The entire skin of both her arms is covered in goosebumps. “Cold?” he asks solicitously, rubbing a hand across her shoulders. “Let me get you a blanket.” Moving away from her feels like ripping off his own fingernails, but he does it. Breathing in deeply, he engages the tactics he employs during his most stressful days at work. _Control_. 

“I’m not normally the type of girl to do things like this,” Rey is saying, behind his back, as he moves into the other room and rummages desperately in search of something worthy of her, finally encountering something soft and fleecy. _Cashmere_. When he drapes it around her shoulders, Kylo is absurdly pleased to see that her careful braids have tumbled loose into shoulder-length burnished waves. 

“I mean, I don't make a habit of spending late nights with men I barely know,” Rey is still saying, the timbre of her words as fragile as glass. “But we’re matched, so I made an exception.” Her slender shoulders lift upwards in the careful impression of a nonchalant shrug. “I just wanted you to know that.”

The way she looks at him with a mixture of both trust and uncertainty — Kylo’s heart melts. _“Cyar’ika_ ,” he whispers, the almost-taboo endearment slipping from him again. “I know I’m the fucking idiot to get drunk and call you over, but you have to know, you are so much _more_ to me than that.” He can’t tell her how he really feels — he’s never been able to do that — so instead, he shows her. 

He presses his forehead against hers, and she cups his face in her hands, and they just stay there like that, breathing in each other’s desperate, gulping breaths until they slow into something more appropriate.

It is much less of _him and her_ and so much more of _us_. And it is one of the few times of his life that Kylo can actually feel his black and volatile rage bleed slowly away. The maelstrom of emotion that he carries with him — his mother’s disappointment, the public’s rage, his father’s absence, his uncle’s achievements, his own blinding self-loathing — melts into the quiet peace that comes when you bare your soul to someone who _sees_ you, and understands.

 _This_ , Kylo thinks, _is the opposite of loneliness_.

++++

Sunlight filtering through the blinds. Posh, art deco lighting, slab marble and expensive vinyl stacked up in a corner gathering dust. White walls and ceilings, the choice color for those who never make messes. Something plush and soft, a delicious weight against her body.

Rey opens her eyes to see Kylo smiling down at her. His arms are coiled protectively around her midsection and the joy in his eyes _undoes_ her. He’s drowsy and peaceful, full of the languid intimacy that comes from falling asleep and waking up with someone that you truly care about.

Last night crashes into Rey like a tidal wave: Kylo’s devouring kisses, his hands, his passion. It’s followed by a sickening, gut punching swell of hollowness — she does not know how to tell Kylo that after he’d fallen asleep, his arms wrapped around her like she was something utterly precious and special, she’d unearthed _Coach_ from the belt at her hipbone to look at their expiration date. And what she’d seen there… She rocks in place, trying to ease the ache that’s spread from the corners of her heart and into the pumping bloodstream of her body.

“This is the happiest day of my entire life. And it’s not even 9AM,” Kylo declares, and now she almost does cry. 

He senses the vivid change in her almost immediately, one finger reaching to tip her chin. “What is it?”

“I —” she stutters. “Last night, after you fell asleep — I checked _Coach_ for our expiration date.”

He’s instantly awake, reminding Rey of a predator: one second, lazily coiled on a rock in patch of sunshine, the next, muscles tensed and eyes alert, prey in sight. “And?”

She lowers her head. “I should have known better than to hope that I could deserve happiness.”

His voice is a ragged, desperate whisper. “How long?”

“Three days.”

He is quiet for so long that Rey can see the light in his white walled apartment get a little lighter as the morning mist outside starts to wear off. He is quiet for so long that she desperately scans his face for any clue as to what he’s thinking, disconcerted only by the harsh, thin slant of his mouth. 

She almost falls off the sofa when he springs up unexpectedly. His fist makes brutal, rapid contact with the wall. The blood on his knuckles is even brighter when contrasted against the backdrop of all the white accents. 

“Kylo?”

She reaches for him, wiping the blood off his thumb.

“Just go.” His voice is plea. “I can't — I’ll call you tomorrow.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dzwol shâsotkun: [Taken from the Code of the Sith] There is only passion


	5. Chapter 5

In Kansas, summer heat builds. 

Late afternoons swell up with warmth, ripening with a latent energy that struggles to find a suitable release for itself. Palpable, frenetic energy hangs in the air below the clouds, highlighting a visible tension between earth and sky. 

It’s in these situations that twisters often form. Across the flat, unbroken horizon, air funnels build at the base of green-black clouds and grow to wreak havoc across the farmlands.

Rey has seen a lot of twisters in her life. She’s carried eighteen years-worth of memories with her: of barn doors ripped open and flung into the void, of black, apocalyptic skies, of churning, cyclic funnels, of whirling debris and destroyed buildings and underground cellars.

Above all else, she remembers the strange dichotomy of violent tension and absolute stillness. As a twister begins to build, the very air cries out for release, whipping itself up into a funnel of rage and anger and desperation. But at the eye of the storm, everything is oddly still. The sky stops breathing. The earth stops turning. Within the most dangerous place of all, in the center of the hole ripped into the fabric of space and time, all is calm.

++++

It is late summer in the city, heat shimmering up from the concrete, the subways stinking with the odor of a million tightly pressed bodies. Girls spill out of bars and outdoor rooftops, accessorizing with soft smiles and baby handbags. Boys buzz around them like flies, carrying beers, slapping each other on the backs, cursing and laughing incoherently.

Finn texts Rey at 5:29PM, _come out tonight! Morgan Stanley is hosting our summer party at the Gramercy Park Hotel. It’s going to be kickass._

Rey is at home, painting her toenails, when her phone vibrates next to her. She’s quit her job at Ann Taylor while she finishes up her book, hoping to submit it to an editor or self publish it within the next month or so. She blows her big toe dry and types out a response, her heart stuttering and kick-starting in her chest like a failed engine.

_No, sorry, that’s weird. I’m not crashing your work party. Especially because, you know, he might be there._

Finn texts back. _He will be there. And he’s asked me to ask you on three separate occasions if you’d come. The last time he actually said please._

Rey blinks at the screen. She does wants to come. She wants to see Kylo again so badly that her hands shake while she screws the top back onto her bottle of nail polish. Need siphons a gritty, almost metallic taste at the back of her mouth. She takes a deep breath, trying to stitch herself back together. 

A memory, the last time she’d seen him:

_Plush, downy covers wrapped around her ankles. The feel of crisp, white sheets underneath her naked body. Grey dawn light filters underneath the curtains, tinging the all-white room dark. Rey sighs sleepily, stretching experimentally, luxuriously._

_In the hallway, steam pours out from underneath the closed bathroom door. The muted sound of splashing water shuts off. After a few minutes Kylo comes back into the bedroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, hair still damp, water pearling lightly on the tops of his shoulders._

_“Kylo?” Rey whispers throatily. She is caught somewhere in the space between fantasy and reality, where the world tilts on its axis, where dreams of bunnies in meadows can darken in a single instant._

_He bends down. Muscles ripple across his chests and shoulders; the script of his tattoo tautens._

_“Goodbye, cyar'ika", he murmurs, trailing his fingers down the slim ribbon of muscle that lines her arm. His voice is like velvet, his eyes on her, so, so black — and under that ghost of a touch, her skin erupts into goosebumps, the last sliver of space between them combusting with heat. His lips graze her body with feather-light contact, marking the delicate places of her skin: behind her ears, underneath her jaw, the inside of her wrist._

_Outside the window of the apartment, the world is awash with budding life. Blossoms on the trees hang delicately, poised to fall at the touch of just one rogue wind. Birdsong is shrill and tentative. Green shoots dig their way up through concrete cracks, mirroring the change in Rey’s body, something long dormant inside of her finally coming to life._

_“I —” she gasps, a myriad emotions encompassed in that one soft, half uttered syllable._

_“I want you to know,” Kylo says, more like mumbles, his eyes half closed and mad with want. “If I was lucky enough to choose, I’d choose to be with you.”_

++++

Kylo can pinpoint the exact second that the energy shifts, when Rey Kenobi steps onto the balcony of the Gramercy Park Hotel.

Far below him, New York City sprawls out like a patchwork quilt of lights, mapping out an earthly constellation of people and buildings and things. Above him, rich greenery and twinkling light displays are woven through an elegant pergola that winds its way around the balcony. Giant glass structures behind the bar house a dizzying array of spirits, bartenders busy stirring and shaking cocktails garnished with fruit and candy and herbs. It’s a beautiful, otherworldly display — dimmed only by Rey’s presence. Now that she's here, he can't look at anything else.

She’s wearing a short dress that clings to the tops of her thighs, colored so deep violet, it’s almost black. A delicate gold chain wrapped around her neck catches the light and dances, sending little prisms of color sparkling his way. Her eyes are carefully bruised with magenta and gold coloring meant to offset her dress. And something in Kylo is suddenly aching, gulping air for the first time in months, like all along he’s been underwater, holding his breath and only going through the motions. 

If the months without her had been a blur, racing by in unthinking, unfeeling black and white minutes — then now, every single second is electric. He pushes past the throngs of his coworkers and a bunch of waiters who look like they part time as male models, one of them sporting the kind of cheekbones typically seen underneath designer sunglasses. He glances at Kylo and Kylo glances back, neither of them interested in the other. 

“Rey,” Kylo calls, reaching out to her. 

She turns. Sleepless nights and days spent apart fall away like they were never real; _this_ is real. “Kylo. How are you?”

The thing between them is magnetic enough that he can feel the tug of her spell ten feet away. Cosmic fate is the only thing pushing them apart; everything else is pulling them together. He tries to remember to swallow and almost chokes on his own spit. “You came.”

She half smiles. “Yeah. To see Finn.”

 _Finn_. The bubble of hope building within him deflates, but he forces a smile. “I’m still glad you’re here.”

++++

When Kylo looks at Rey, his face is full of a hungry and restless emotion.

It makes her think of the way his hands used to cup her body, starting feet first, then moving up her calves and thighs to trace her hip bones. She thinks of Kansas twisters, tearing the black sky apart. _If I was lucky enough to choose, I’d choose to be with you._

“It’s good to see you again.” That’s as much as she can offer him, while still maintaining her protective wall. “I missed you.”

His whole face changes at her words, his lips parting to exhale the most ragged breath imaginable. He bridges the distance between them before she can even blink, grabbing her left hand to kiss her palm — and not a sweet kiss either. Her skin twists with sudden, furious desire, torpedos firing through her bloodstream. There is no build up to this pressure of lips on skin. First it is nothing, and then it is everything.

Clipped to her waist, _Coach_ senses the close physical proximity of two people who should no longer be together, and beeps out a single sustained note in clear warning.

Rey jolts backwards from Kylo, worried she’s having some sort of seizure. She's vaguely aware that they are starting to attract attention, nothing major, but the soft curiosity is still enough to bother her. "What are you doing?” She hisses. “Kylo, _no_. Stop. Wait.”

But Kylo has never been known for _stopping_ and _waiting_. Rey can tell that part of him is almost enjoying this moment, relishing the way he’s caught her off guard and forced her to react to him, tearing her wall down around her ears. “No. You might … be … the great Kylo Ren,” She stutters, terror rendering her inarticulate, “you might be protected because of your money and your status. But I’m not. And I can’t jeopardize my entire life on ...whatever this _thing_ is between us.” 

She is fully aware of the consequences of defying _Coach’s_ orders. A new world was built from the ashes of Anakin Skywalker’s passion and bloodlust, one erected around the cornerstone of order and control, and she _must_ adhere to it. Humans don't get to choose anymore, not when they've proven they only make bad choices. _“No._ I’m not throwing my life away for you. I didn’t come here for you.”

Something fractures behind his eyes, something hope had made whole shattering. “Rey. _Please_.”

She shakes her head, desperate, angry at him, furious at herself. “Don’t follow me.”

++++

Kylo might not follow her physically, but his eyes never leave her side. She spends the rest of the night chatting with Finn and drinking something fruity in a fluted, frosted glass garnished with a single, speared blackberry.

At one point, she moves indoors and crosses to the bar to order something else. It’s crowded, the room full of people and noise. When Rey leans in close to make her drink order heard, the bartender returns the favor, his lips brushing across the grainy shell of her ear as he replies. 

Kylo clenches his fist, his surroundings momentarily dimmed by the rage that flares within him, vicious and sudden as a spurt of blood. 

He can see Rey’s reflection in the mirror above the bar, bits and pieces of her beautiful face superimposed over the city skyline. Her eyes meet his in the glass.

++++

Later, Kylo intercepts her while Rey is waiting for the elevator to go back down to the lobby.

“What?” she snaps, jabbing angrily at the buttons like it will make the elevator come faster. “Haven’t you done enough? What more can you possibly want?”

“It’s late. Please don’t take the subway.”

“Why do you care?”

He’s stung. “Is that even a question? Let me call you a car.”

Rey shrugs, sagging against the wall, apparently too tired to argue. Or maybe she just knows better. The eyeliner is smudged under her left eye, leaving a bright blue streak that’s charming in its youthfulness. A shimmering of gold glitter dusts her shoulders like manufactured freckles. Kylo’s hands ache to hold her. “How have you been? Really?”

She lifts her chin as the elevator pings up to our floor. “Great. Really great.”

The only other person in the elevator with them is a blonde girl in a leopard bra, pink stilettos and dramatic yellow eyeshadow, displaying miles of tanned, toned stomach muscles. Unconcerned by the air conditioner and the slight chill in the air outside, she taps out frantic messages on her iPhone, taloned fingernails clicking wildly against the screen like modern day Morse Code. Kylo cocks his head watching her, unsure how he can be so disinterested in this half naked girl, and so utterly infatuated by clothed Rey. 

As if sensing his attention, Leopard Bra rips her eyes away from the phone long enough to stare back. Her cherry red mouth curves upwards into a slow, predatory smile. 

Next to him, Rey clears her throat loudly. “Can I help you?” 

Leopard Bra swivels towards her with the fearlessness of the truly drunk. Her eyes bounce back and forth between the two of them, manicured eyebrows raising to her hairline. “Are you his girlfriend? Because, honestly…”

“Honestly, _what_?” Rey snaps back, so coolly that even the air conditioner seems to plummet a few degrees. Her mouth smiles blithely, even as her eyes say _bite me_. Kylo’s heart ricochets back and forth in his rib cage. He’s consistently surprised by her, and also consistently surprised that he can still feel this way, when he’s spent so long being numb. 

Leopard Bra shrugs. “Sorry. I guess I misunderstood.”

“Keep moving,” Rey snarls, as the elevator doors open onto the ground floor.

Kylo bites back a smile, walking her outside. “You're cute when you're jealous.”

“This is _not_ what that was,” Rey counters, pushing the glass door in front of her. 

Kylo is standing too close to her again. His shoulder blade presses lightly into her chest. They inhale and exhale in tandem with one another. 

Outside the hotel, Rey crosses her arms across her chest defensively. “So were you actually planning on ordering me an uber or are you trying to abduct me?”

“Oh, abduct you, definitely.” He punches her address into his phone, while she shifts from one foot to the other, her gaze fixed on the sky. He tries to think of something interesting to say, to forge a final moment with her, but he can't come up with anything big enough to encompass the things that swell in his chest when he looks at her. Maybe he has a hernia. Maybe he's dying. Maybe this is how people die, maybe they go mad with wanting things they can never have. 

“See that one star?” Rey asks, pointing. 

Kylo looks, tracing her gaze upwards.

“See it? The red one? The blinking one? It’s called Betelgeuse.”

“Why is it red?” Kylo asks. People filter past them through the hotel doors: women with glossy, red lipstick and perilously high heels, clutching onto men in tuxedos with gelled hair. Away from the bright lights of the party, the night is deep and dark, stabbed through with stars and city lights.

“Because it’s emitting almost 7,500 times as much energy as the sun,” Rey replies casually, chewing on her lower lip. “It’s a red super-giant. Red super-giants are stars that are close to the end of their lives.”

He is strangely emotional listening to her talk about a fading star. “So it’s dying.”

“Yes, but,” Rey waves a hand, watching as a Toyota whips around the corner, assumedly her ride home, “technically, it’s been dying for centuries. It's still going to outlive everyone, including you and I.”

Kylo watches Rey get into the car, taking his heart with her.

++++

Sometimes, on the nights when he really misses her, when whiskey and the other women that Coach sends his way aren’t enough to dull the ache, he looks skyward for it — the pulsating, dark red star slowly bleeding out it’s life force.

He takes odd solace in the fact that he and Rey live under the same sky as this dying star.

++++

“Can you change it?” Kylo asks his mother a few weeks later, sitting in her penthouse apartment high above Central Park. Up here in the clouds, it’s easy to believe that they are demigods, creators of worlds, held to a different standard than mere mortals.

“Change what?” Leia replies carefully, eyeing her son shrewdly. Something has shifted within him over the past few weeks, something small and secret and determined to stay buried. She can't quite put her finger on it. 

“Coach,” Kylo says, not meeting her eyes. She's not fooled by his tone of forced casualness. “Can it be overruled in the event that it is … perhaps incorrect? You and Luke are its makers, so could you make an exception for special cases.”

Leia bites her lip. Kylo is not the first to think this way, and he won’t be the last. 

Before Kylo, there were other men and women who didn’t want to listen to Coach. They swore their love was stronger than death, but it turns out that death makes everyone small. Leia had watched them stagger as the blades hummed through their necks, and their headless bodies crumpled, a slow and awful fall.

 _In the New World, there must be order._

She’d never told anyone but Luke how she’d loved before Han. Back then, her heart had felt so full she thought it might explode. Maybe it was just unfamiliar with pumping blood instead of strength and secrets. 

The skin under Kylo’s eyes is bruised like old fruit. Brought low by wanting, burdened with dreams of a girl who flits across his fantasies, he’s never resembled Anakin Skywalker more. 

“No.” Leia’s voice is sad. “There are no exceptions.”


	6. Chapter 6

Leia Skywalker-Solo never knew her father. 

She and Luke were barely children when Anakin Skywalker was forcibly strapped to a chair and administered jolts of highly-charged, alternating currents that fatally damaged his brain and destroyed his internal organs. The coroner’s report ruled that his death was caused by electrical overstimulation of the heart — but Leia knows this wasn’t the case. After Padme’s death, her father’s heart had plummeted down within the darkest depths of himself, only to be resurrected as something hard and molten and metal. 

And dead hearts can’t be shocked or stimulated or killed. They can’t feel anything at all.

Sometimes, Leia thinks that same heart is half hers. She envisions a great, beating hulk of an organ suspended within herself, something not quite metallic, but not quite human either. It is this numbness that has allowed her to commit a thousand unspeakable atrocities, all in the name of peace. Luke possesses more of their mother’s light-hearted spirit, but she has her father’s roiling darkness and inner turmoil, tempered with a steely determination. Luke smiles, and girls fall to their knees. Leia doesn’t smile — except to show teeth.

After their father’s death, Luke and Leia were sent upstate to live with their grandparents, Padme’s parents, Ruwee and Jobal Naberrie. Luke spent most of their childhood making friends, adopting stray animals and eating large quantities of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Leia _plotted_. She sat in front of the huge glass windows overlooking the lake, and traced the path of water droplets with her fingertips. She excelled in school, feigned compliance with house rules, and did everything her grandparents told her not to as soon as their backs were turned. 

When she was seven years old, she found the folders hidden in the top shelf of the closet. Stamped with the FBI logo, the pictures were grainy and choppy, black and white stills of murder scenes: severed fingers and toes, tongueless mouths that gaped and pleaded soundlessly, mutilated eye sockets and truncated corpses. There are places on the human body where you can peel back the skin and puncture the arteries to bleed dry with maximum efficiency and minimal pain — but Anakin Skywalker wasn’t interested in this. His signature murders were messy and bloody and crude. Devoid of feeling, he was only interested in inflicting pain.

As a child, Leia handled the photos gently, imagining that her fingers would come away rust-colored, red tinted like finger paint, stained with her father’s sins. Shrinking away from the visceral violence, she instinctively understood that she was somehow implicated in her father’s crimes, by virtue of his blood pumping through her veins and tainting her body.

At school, teachers stumbled over the last name _Skywalker_ , and her classmates were cruel more often than not. Kids whispered behind her in the hallways and threw pencils at the back of her head, and there was always a wide berth around her table in the lunchroom. 

Luke was like a walking sliver of sunshine, a magnet who naturally drew people to him, but Leia’s glow was darker. 

When she was a teenager, someone slit a black cat’s throat and hung it upside down from a tree in their front lawn. Scrawled underneath the dead animal were the words, _Die, Satan Spawn_. 

Leia pulled her hair back into the tightest ponytail she could stand and dug a hole in the dirt using her grandfather’s shovel, callusing her hands in the process. She buried the cat, but even underground, she could still smell the corpse: a mingling of copper and dirt, a mixture of moisture and rot and decomposition. 

The blood on the porch slowly congealed from red to black. She scrubbed it clean until her hands were raw. She vowed that her life wouldn’t always be like this. One day, there would be justice in lieu of the violent passion and devastating love that had simultaneously conceived her into being and ripped her life apart. 

There would be order. She would make it so.

Later on in life, this unwavering sense of justice would carry her past the killings of all the couples who chose to defy _Coach_ and so dishonor her most holy covenant: order. She told herself, _the blood on my hands is all in the name of peace_. But Luke couldn’t handle it. He moved to the West Coast and bought a bungalow out on the beach, where he meditated every morning and watched the sunrise and smoked the weed that he bought from yuppies at Venice Beach. 

Leia hasn’t seen him in almost three years. 

And so, alone in her penthouse amidst Manhattan’s cloudy skies, she rules with an iron fist. She is indifferent and untouchable, an Ice Queen, Savior of the New World she sacrificed everything to build. She is afraid of nothing and no one. 

Until —

Kylo, her only child, staggers into her apartment wearing a vintage T-shirt that used to belong to Han, combat boots and his trademark leather jacket. His face looks old and weary and haunted, a consequence of all the sleepless nights where he lays awake in bed and wrestles with his desire to run away with Rey and escape _Coach’s_ cruel whims. 

It is not such a far-fetched thought. Around the same time that _Coaches_ were implemented into mainstream society, walls were erected around the perimeters of most large cities. Guards and watchtowers and electric fences were put into place to shoot anyone who tried to escape. Beyond the boundaries, slivers of “safe” spaces existed outside the reach of society, with the largest contingents known to be found in Montana and Wyoming. 

Desperate couples sometimes try to climb the walls and exist in the wilderness. Sometimes they make it, and sometimes they’re shot on sight. Mostly though, the elements kill them off. Outside of society, there are no stores or houses or electricity or plumbing or food and so no basic means of survival.

Even still, Kylo thinks, _maybe that would be better than this_.

Leia has no idea what her son is thinking, but looking at him head on frightens her. He burns with a muted intensity and a quiet desperation that threatens to unmake all she has bled to build. 

She never knew her father. There are few pictures of him left, because everyone wanted to forget. Leia possesses only the vaguest idea of what he really looked like. 

But she sees him living on in Kylo. She sees vestiges of Anakin in her son’s clenched fists, in the tautened tendons of his neck, in the longing that he wears so baldly, splashed across his face like bright paint. She sees the way his fingers tremble, the way his eyes empty when he looks at her, the way that wasting away over a girl has worn him paper thin, so fragile and volatile that a light breeze might blow him away from her at any moment. 

Leia can speak seven different languages. She’s worked as a translator while promoting _Coach’s_ global launch. She knows how to say, _we are honored to meet you_ in Swahili and _thank you, the food is exquisite_ , in Mandarin, and yet, she wonders how it can possibly be so difficult to talk to the person she carried within her belly for nine months.

She thinks, _the women of this family have always been strong. It is the men who have loved too much and too hard and too badly._

+++

In the time since he’s last seen Rey, Kylo has worked 80 hour-weeks, grocery-shopped, organized his Spotify music into playlists according to some of his darker moods, tried out new shampoo, bought new ties from Brooks Brothers and attempted to learn how to cook chicken cordon bleu.

It’s just like living. Sort of.

In October, he’s asked to do a radio interview with WBMP-FM (“ALT 92.3 FM”), in honor of the twentieth anniversary of Han Solo’s hit rock band, _The Millennium Falcon_. Ideally, the station wanted to interview Han directly, but as his publicist consistently told producers, Han was retired and no longer speaking with the press. Kylo was the back-up choice, but he doesn’t take it personally. For once, he wants to use his privileged status to do something worthwhile. 

He deletes and rewrites a text multiple times. In the end, it takes him ten minutes to compose a message to Rey that says, _hey if you’re near a radio you should tune in to 92.3 around 7pm tonight_

A lack of punctuation generally denotes indifference, and he doesn’t want her to feel threatened or pressured. He is remembering their last encounter, where he’d lost his head and kissed her palm the way he wanted to kiss her whole body, where her mouth didn’t quite match up with her eyes when she’d told him to leave her alone. 

His phone buzzes. Her reply gives him nothing at all, other than an equal lack of punctuation. _Why_

At least she’s talking to him. He types back, _You’ll see :)_ and is promptly disgusted with himself for sending a digital smiley face to the girl he dreams about (if he _could_ dream, that is). What is he, ten fucking years old?

She doesn’t respond.

+++

Rey is just getting off a shift at the Carlyle at 6:45PM. During the subway ride back down to Brooklyn, she listens to half a podcast about martial arts, then scrolls through a playlist of John Frusciante’s solo work, most of it written during the time period in which he was addicted to coke and heroin and holed up in his graffiti-ed Hollywood Hills home.

She thinks that the wailing guitar and fierce riffs and quavering vocals will distract her from continuing to think about Kylo Fucking Ren, but they don’t. 

Once home, she immediately fiddles with the dial on the radio until she finds the correct station. It’s currently on a commercial break, two different voices screaming about the best low price tires, and a bar on the Lower East Side where girls drink free on Thursday nights from 6-9PM. A fluorescent light buzzes loudly in the kitchen, abruptly crackling into darkness.

Rey grabs her step ladder and hunts around in the closet for a fresh bulb while the radio returns to its regularly scheduled programming. 

_Here with us now_ , the announcer is booming out in a weirdly distorted voice, _we have Kylo Ren, who has graciously agreed to share his memories of growing up with his famous rock star father, Han Solo. As many of you know, today marks the twentieth anniversary of the release The Millennium Falcon’s first album. Who could forget the worldwide success of “Sins of The Father?”_

A snarling cacophony of chords fill the air, segwaying into a breathtaking riff that builds into the chorus:

_Because we all have our own devices / when it comes to handling mid-life crises / but yours involved torture and murder and dried blood under your nails_

Rey has gone completely still. The light bulb hangs limply from her hand, falls and shatters across the wood floor. Dazed, she reaches down to pick up the remains and inadvertently impales her foot on a shard of glass. Blood wells up from underneath the skin and drips gently onto the floor. Stunned into a state of shock, she limps around the kitchen. She can’t remember where she keeps her band-aids.

She used to listen to _Millennium Falcon_ when she was just a kid. Back when she had nothing and no one, she’d play Han Solo’s _All the Lonely Space Girls_ and _Hyperspace Glow_ on a rotating loop until she fell asleep. It occurs to her now how little she actually knows about Kylo Ren. They’d had the better part of three days together, during which time they’d mostly stayed at Kylo’s posh apartment, lazing around in bed, kissing and holding each other and touching and — 

Her face flames. She’s such an idiot. The worst part is that Han Solo’s superstar fame had only been eclipsed by one other person. If Kylo is Han’s son, then that means that his mother is — 

_Now clearly this song was influenced by Leia Skywalker-Solo_ , the radio is back to saying, _The lyrics deal pretty explicitly with some of [notorious serial killer] Anakin Skywalker’s terrible acts. Was that something that your parents ever talked to you about?_

Kylo’s voice sounds scratchy and snarly over the air waves. _Not really Trevor_ , he says, _Didn’t make for great dinner table conversation._

Rey snorts back a laugh, utterly overwhelmed by the irony of the situation. Kylo is the only man to ever make her feel _this way_...and they can never be together because of premeditated dating algorithms that _his mother_ put into place. God. Her life is such a fucking joke.

The interview continues, _So what did you guys talk about at the dinner table then?_

 _Oh, lots of things. My mom’s work. My dad’s music, his touring schedule. My grades in school. I was a model student by the way, just in case you’re wondering!_ Kylo’s voice turns conversational, almost light. _Give his publicist a raise_ , Rey thinks admiringly, before realizing that of course any child of Leia Skywalker-Solo’s would have to be media-trained for all occasions. 

_I’m sure you were. Now tell us about your father. Do you have a close relationship with him?_

Another one of _Millennium Falcon’s_ top songs,“Stars In My Eyes” rings out across the airwaves, pure and acidic. Belatedly, Rey now realizes it’s a song Han wrote for Kylo. It’s a tender, slow ballad underlaid with a bass hook that’s pure genius. 

_Very close,_ Kylo is saying, _My dad actually taught me how to play the guitar. I don’t play well,_ he laughs, somehow making the sound seem natural, even distorted through layers of static, _but I can do some basic covers. Rolling Stones. Simon and Garfunkel. Eddie Vedder. Very basic Chili Peppers stuff. Enough to impress the girls, I guess. And besides music, my dad loves machines: cars and trains and planes and stuff. We used to work on old cars together._

Rey wonders if anything he’s saying is true, or if it’s all lies. She’s never seen a single guitar in his apartment. _Impress the girls?!_ She barely recognizes this disembodied voice.

_And do you feel like you and your dad have similar taste?_

_In music? For sure. We both love grunge rock, classic rock, the blues, some older stuff too. We’ve always had different opinions on other things though, for instance I love science fiction books, while dad is strictly a fan of old westerns. Oh! Speaking of! One of my good friends Rey Kenobi just wrapped up a killer sci-fi novel, which is one of the best things I’ve read in ages. It’s actually available on her website for a limited time, so I’d encourage all you sci-fi fans to head over and check it out._

Rey forgets about her bleeding foot. She forgets about hunting down her gauze and band-aids. She forgets about the glass spread out like ground up icicles all over the floor of her apartment. For a minute, her vision goes red. Her brain disengages. Her pulse spikes. Her anger owns her, spasming through her bloodstream like a shot of pure adrenaline. Almost spitting with rage, she dives around desperately for her phone, leaving a trail of blood in her wake.

 _First of all,_ she types out viciously, attacking the screen with her fingertips, _you’ve never even read my book. Second of all, how DARE you go on a radio show and plug it like we’re “good friends.” Good friends?! What was that?! I don’t know what we are but we’re not … that. Third of all, I don’t need your help. I’m not a fucking charity case._ She’s about to hit send, right before she realizes that her attention is what Kylo has been after this whole time. Her fingers still on the screen. She’s not going to give him the satisfaction of her words, even electronic ones. Just thinking about Kylo puts her on an obsessive road to nowhere. What he really wants is this: her, thinking about him, listening to him talk about her. What is happening is this: the two on them, on an endless parallel path that loops around but never quite meets up, always wishing, always wanting, never having. 

_That’s great,_ the radio announcer is back to saying, _What’s her site?_

Kylo smoothly rattles off alarmingly personal details. Rey can’t ever remember telling him this much about her book or her website or any of it. _Stalker._ She should have realized. Even before she knew who his parents really were, any man who could call her _cyar’ika_ and mean it spelled trouble. 

The interview takes a brief pause, playing more of Han’s music in the interludes. Rey listens to a myriad electric hooks, and some percussive, synth type loops she hasn’t heard before. 

_So, Kylo,_ the interview continues. _A little birdy told us it’s your birthday next week?_

 _Tuesday,_ Kylo responds, _I’ll be thirty. Sh, don’t tell._

_And Coach still hasn’t matched you up yet with anyone?_

Is it Rey’s imagination, or does she hear the careful lilt in his words? _Not yet Trevor, but I’m sure it’ll be any day now._

_And what does the great Kylo Ren want for his birthday?_

_Oh, you know. Probably a new guitar. A Taylor or something._

Rey’s phone buzzes in her hands. _Actually,_ Kylo’s text reads, _all I want for my birthday is you._

She hurls the phone against the wall before she can be tempted to respond. Her foot is still bleeding. Her apartment is still dark. Her life is still in shambles.


	7. Chapter 7

Leia Skywalker-Solo’s ridiculously overpriced penthouse apartment at 432 Park Avenue boasts 12-foot ceilings, a wood-burning fireplace, an observatory, two powder rooms, and a large library with a grand piano that she doesn’t know how to play. The rooftop has its own greenhouse, full of exotic orchids and pink lotuses and dahlias that Leia forgets to water. Her art collection is renowned worldwide, but she’s less interested in the actual paintings and more interested in the way people’s faces look when they ask if Picasso’s _Tête de Femme_ is really hanging in her foyer. 

Far from extravagant jewelry or elaborate decor or rare flowers — her favorite thing in the building is the giant map superimposed across the enormous ceiling of her bedroom. Sprawled over almost 500 square feet, in every state and every country of the world, minuscule red dots signify the concentration of Coaches in a given area. 

She commissioned the state of New York to be painted at eye level above her bed, and at night, she stares up at the island of Manhattan until she’s memorized everything there is to know about the dip and sway and curve of the map’s lines. She can’t remember the last time she ever slept at night. 

Instead, she lies awake and watches eight billion red dots blink down at her in the world that she created.

+++

Following _that_ radio interview, Rey’s website earns over 500,000 clicks in two days, generating such a high volume of users that it crashes her hard drive. She goes to the genius bar at the Apple Store and gets help from a man with a lazy eye and three piercings in his left eyebrow. He fixes her computer by turning it off and on and installing some sort of malware protection. When he gives it back to her, his left eye focuses on her face, while his right swivels away towards the wall, both of them screaming in tandem, _you’re wasting my time._

Rey walks home with her face flaming and her phone buzzing with unread texts. Back at her apartment, she bleaches the entirety of her bathroom floor, cooks ridiculous, time-consuming meals in a mad frenzy of activity, and takes on double shifts at the Carlyle. 

Kylo’s birthday dawns in a haze of long, blue color that stretches the sky thin until the sun rises to melt it all into nothingness. Rey tries hard not to think about him and can’t think about anything else. She is so distracted on her way to work that she trips halfway down the subway steps at Borough Hall and accidentally walks into a telephone pole, ending up with an ugly, eggplant-colored bruise under her left cheekbone. That night, she gets dressed up in the tightest, shortest LBD she owns, smears her face with a heavy handed application of concealer, and takes the L train to the village with Finn to get shit-faced over tequila sours. Drunkenly, she sends Kylo a happy birthday text.

He responds immediately, _Not sure what you’re up to tonight, but The Killers are playing at Mercury Lounge and I know how much you love them. I could get tickets. You could come. We could dance._

Rey’s pulse spikes. The mental image of the two of them swaying in tandem to the drum line of _When You Were Young_ is a powerful one. She imagines how it would feel: how the bass would thump the speakers, how their hips would crush together when they moved, how she’d look into Kylo’s eyes as the synthesizers wailed, how the dark energy between them would rise to a crescendo with the chorus.

Her left hand shakes when she takes another shot. She texts back sloppily, _can’t sorry im down in the village with Finn._

Over her shoulder, Finn raises his eyebrows and wags a finger. “What would _Coach_ think of your little flirtation, hm?”

“Shuddup,” Rey slurs rudely. Her phone buzzes again. _Tell him its my birthday_

“Never thought I’d say this, but seriously, what the fuck did you do to Kylo?” Finn wonders. “Last year he used to stalk around the office yelling at all the junior analysts. Now, he just mopes around in his office with the blinds drawn. I can’t figure out which version is worse.”

Rey frowns down at her phone screen and decides not to answer. She cannot engage in this — it will break her heart.

Eventually, she knows, he will stop thinking of her. He is Kylo Ren, youngest EVP in Morgan Stanley’s recent history, son of Leia Skywalker-Solo, creator of the New World and Protector of the People. His career path is straight and sure; his love life will be even more so. One of these days, _Coach_ will match him up with a bombshell, a retired Victoria’s Secret Model who looks like Lydia, except maybe with Giselle’s hair or Heidi Klum’s hips or Kate Moss’s cool factor. They’ll have beautiful children with wavy hair and light colored eyes, attend state functions and smile at the cameras with no food in their teeth. They’ll be featured grocery shopping in the “Stars: They’re Just Like Us” column of all the gossip rags — except that Kylo isn’t just like her, and he never will be.

Meanwhile Rey will continue to slog through multiple jobs, write her books at night, pay her taxes every April and avoid getting hit by cabs. Either that, or she’ll move back to Kansas to live in a flat, dry landscape that mirrors the interior of her soul. To Finn she says, “I think I’d still take mopey Kylo over angry Kylo.”

He shrugs, indicating that his interest in the conversation is flagging. Rey takes another sip of her drink. In her peripheral vision, she sees the phone screen light up.

_All I ever think about is you._

+++

The next morning, Rey wakes up to stale sunlight filtering in through her crooked blinds. She’s naked in bed, with no memory of ever coming home, her mouth musty with the taste of sleep and leftover liquor. Fuck all, her head is _pounding_.

Advil plus gatorade plus egg, cheese and bacon bagels have cured every hangover she’s ever had. She gets dressed in a black tank top, jeans and low-slung combat boots, throws her hair up in a sloppy approximation of a bun and ventures out cautiously to face the world.

When she comes back, sustenance in hand, the door to her apartment is wide open and Leia Skywalker-Solo is sitting on her bed, mouth curved and eyebrows cocked, wearing a low cut dress the color of dried blood, waiting for her.

+++

Leia stares at the girl that her son has fallen for, and the girl stares back at her. She is small and unassuming, her ears studded with silvered piercings, her eyes a musty haze of green and brown, her hair slicked back to emphasize a face full of high cheekbones and light freckles. In the tender skin of her throat, interspersed among the delicate tapestry of blue veins, her pulse beats furiously, the only indication of her distress.

Leia folds her veined hands and says, “I thought you’d be prettier.”

 _Pretty_ is too small a word to encompass what this girl is, when _deadly_ would be better. Growing up with a murderous father means that she has always seen teeth and claws in the shadows. It is Leia’s nature to assume the worst of people. 

The girl — Rey — drops her bag on the dresser and folds her body onto the nearest chair. Her eyes are calm and steady. Her voice is so careful and even you could measure it against a ruler and it would line up perfectly. “Would you like a glass of water? How can I help you?”

Leia waves her hands. “No water, thank you. I understand you’ve been in communication with my son, Kylo Ren.”

Rey’s face is opaque, betraying absolutely nothing, exuding only a stillness that surprises Leia with it’s intensity. She’s had to make visits like these before, and usually the mere physicality of her is enough to terrify people, though she finds it difficult to empathize with emotions like _pain_ and _fear_. Maybe she no longer remembers how to crawl out of the mask that she wears like a second skin. 

Rey says, “ _Coach_ matched us together, so yes, we were in communication.”

“But that was months ago. And yet, you continue to remain in each other’s lives?”

For maybe the first time, Leia sees Rey’s eyes flicker. “Well. Kylo can be persistent, which I’m sure you already know. He’s very intense.”

 _A family trait_ , Leia thinks. She cannot remember her father, but for the smallest, most inconsequential things. She only remembers the color of his hair, the baritone of his voice, the depth of his rages. Anakin Skywalker didn’t just live; he _burned_. There is a reason Leia has chosen to live as a woman of ice, opting for long sleeves to cover up the snow in her veins, and drawing in slow, clanking breaths around the metallic heart in her chest. It is because she is terrified of the fire that had burnt between Anakin and Padme, banked only when Padme bled out during childbirth, her legs coated with a slick, red river — leaving Anakin to burn up alone in a blaze of despair.

Leia tells Rey, “I assume you know the consequences of betraying _Coach’s_ mandate?”

Rey is very, very still. “I haven’t betrayed _Coach_.”

“But you still might,” Leia guesses. The air in the room presses down on her, smelling faintly of sweat and musk. She thinks of two wolves circling each other, sniffing for blood, gauging each other’s weakness. _Little Red Riding Hood_ was her favorite fairy tale growing up, mainly because she was never as disgusted by the wolf as she ought to have been. In the end, he wasn’t smart enough to evade the huntsman, and so was slit open by his axe. In this way, fairy tales mimic reality: the strong survive while the weak get eaten alive. 

“So let’s say Kylo texts you once or twice,” Leia explains to Rey, setting up the scene. “He’s nice; you like each other. So you go out for drinks or dinner, two exes reuniting for friendly conversation and some light flirting. It’s harmless at first — until you end up together in bed, until he tells you he loves you, until you think you love him back, enough to defy the oldest and most sacred law in modern history. Would you like to hear about how many other men and women have come before you and thought this way? You might think you’re special for feeling this way, but really, you’re completely unoriginal, maybe the billionth girl to imagine a Prince Charming come to save you on horseback.” _And even in the fairy tales_ , she wants to add, _Prince Charming doesn’t come charging in on his white steed. Usually, he’s stuck in some sort of mortal danger, or being used as bait by the villain, and so the heroine has to save herself._ This too, is true to real life. Leia knows all about saving herself.

“You’re only a sad, little cliche,” she tells Rey, sticking in the metaphorical knife a little deeper. “Would you like me to tell you what an execution looks like? I’ve seen girls like you go to the chopping block screaming that love conquers all, but they all die the same way: afraid, alone, on their knees.” 

Rey is shaking, the pupils of her eyes blown wide. She whispers, “I don’t understand. I haven’t done anything wrong. What do you want from me?”

Leia smiles, revealing the pointed edges of her lower canines, just like a wolf would. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m going to help you.”

+++

Time passes steadily. Fall fades into winter. Condensation drips from the leaden skies, and smashed up slush lies draped across the city like shattered glass. Kylo spends two weeks texting Rey without a single response. When he calls her, an automated voice cheerfully tells him that the number is no longer in service. Fed up beyond measure, he takes the 5 train all the way down her apartment in Crown Heights and bangs on the door for half an hour until a girl with pink dreadlocks and a studded jacket with Steven Tyler’s face on the sleeves tells him that no one named Rey Kenobi lives in the building.

A week later, Kylo gets promoted, and celebrates alone in his apartment with a handle of whiskey and three Ambiens. He wakes up to the ceiling spinning and his ears roaring. When he tries to stand, he ends up falling, his cheek pressed to the fancy carpet that cost more than three month’s rent, courtesy of his mother’s black Amex card. Lying on the ground, the room takes on a new perspective. Underneath the dresser, a sparkle of color refracts the low light in the room. It looks like the missing diamond cufflink he thought he’d lost last month. 

Kylo squints at it, disinterested. He read in _New Scientist_ that diamonds are no longer the hardest mineral known to man. It’s two usurpers, lonsdaleite and wurtzide boron nitride, are formed from colliding meteors and volcanic eruptions. 

He finds it fitting that such violence naturally forges the hardest substances.

+++

In the springtime, _Coach_ matches Kylo up with a girl named Julia Webb. She is 28 years old, with gray green eyes, a tattoo of a lotus flower on her left shoulder and a curtain of extremely straight, white blonde hair. He takes her to Elio’s, on the Upper East Side, and they sit straight backed in a crowded room full of Manhattan’s casually wealthy, pushing around platefuls of expensive fettucini, talking about college and jobs and families.

And then Julia puts down her fork, takes a huge swallow of wine, looks straight at him and says, “You should know. I’m in love with a man named Bran.” And underneath a facade stitched together by a beautiful face and eyes the color of muddy grass, there is something raw and cavernous and empty. In her face, Kylo sees the same naked pain that he’s spent the last year wrestling. 

“Me too,” he admits, a little unsteadily, the first time he’s voiced the depth of his feelings aloud. “Well, not with Bran. With someone else.”

But they smile at each other and stop pretending to eat fettucini, and suddenly, Julia Webb gets a lot more interesting.

He takes her home and fucks her, careful not to make eye contact. She whispers, I _’ll pretend you’re Bran; you can pretend I’m someone else too_ , and Kylo thinks he can actually _feel_ a sliver of his heart dislodge from the whole. 

Afterwards, he wraps his arms around her while the sweat cools on their bodies and steams gently into the still-chilly air. Julia tells him how she met Bran in elementary school. Her parents had been fighting for days. She’d listened to them scream at each other at night through the thin walls of the house, and one morning, a teacher’s perfume that smelled like her mom’s had triggered a meltdown in the middle of snacktime. Without a word, Bran had handed over his apple juice. _You can have my cookie too if you want,_ he’d told her, his eyes wide, _I don’t like it when you cry._

“Tell me about your girl,” Julia requests, nestling into the crook of his arm. 

“We first met in a bar,” Kylo offers, and is transported back to the very first time he saw Rey, when she walked into Tijuana Picnic, carrying in rainwater from the street, the mist a light, damp sheen around her hair, and her eyes so vivid and open and alive, willing to let the world pour into them. Everyone else in the room had been drinking and laughing without showing teeth, performing on autopilot, but she’d been awake. And every time he thinks about it, it feels less and less like coincidence, less and less like a mandate and more of a … choice. Two people, drawn to each other, feeling a spark, and reacting on it.

But in this world, they don’t get to choose.


	8. Chapter 8

Rey works hard to convince herself that she likes her new life in Connecticut. 

Leia sets her up in a beautiful apartment in the nice part of Stanford and tells her that the change in scenery will spur her creative writing juices. It turns out that Leia knows a lot of people in the publishing world. Rey releases her first copies of _Star Wars_ under a pseudonym, and the book does absurdly well for an author with no credentials and no social media presence — selling close to 20,000 copies. Leia tells her, _you don’t have to work three jobs anymore._ Rey argues fiercely, saying that she wants to write her books on her own merit, but Leia says _nonsense_ , and the next month, there are more zeros at the end of Rey’s checking account than she’s ever seen before in her life. 

That weekend, she takes Metro North two stops over to Darien. She walks around and stares at the stunningly gorgeous houses of New England’s elite, her gaze lingering on the tasteful shingles, the sweeping, manicured lawns, the impeccable roofing, and wide, circular windows designed for maximum sun exposure. Unaccountably angry, she kicks a blood red petunia in someone else’s yard, burying it under a pile of dirt. _I’ll have you know,_ she snarls at a tulip with the gall to bloom freely, _I am Rey Kenobi and I can’t be bought off._

Then she takes a cab to Greenwich Avenue and buys an off white, diaphanous dress that she doesn’t even really like — but hey, she can afford it.

+++

The hardest thing for her to deal with is the loneliness.

Rey is somewhat used to being lonely. She grew up unwanted, nursing a hole in her chest that she steadily plugged up with work and school and various social obligations, but as much as her life in New York had grated and rubbed and worn at her — she’d had _people_. And by _people_ , she means Kylo.

One morning, she makes herself a cup of tea and churns out a piece she’s working on for a PR agency that put her up at a luxury Hyatt property when she went to Arizona last month. She’s editing out some of the hotel’s amenities when she gets distracted surfing the web, and stumbles on a Washington Post article screaming about beached whales on the other side of the world.

The piece tells her that last Thursday, 150 short-finned pilot whales stranded themselves on the southwestern tip of Australia. Despite extensive massive rescue efforts, only 6 whales survived, which officials blamed on the rocky terrain and challenging weather conditions. 

Rey learns that the cause of a group whale beaching is hard to determine, but one prevalent theory is that pods of whales accidentally beach themselves when coming to the aid of another beached whale sending out distress signals. 

She stirs sugar into her mug of tea and struggles to imagine that humans would do the same.

+++

Two months later, _Coach_ matches her up with a man named Andrew. At night, the two brush their teeth in tandem in front of the bathroom mirror and Rey compares their appearances in the reflection.

Andrew is blond and clean shaven, hitting just over six feet tall, with eyes so clear, they seem to chase away the shadows. He changed into a UConn tee in lieu of his doctor’s scrubs as soon as he came over, and his big hands mimic a surgeon’s in the way that he deftly holds the toothbrush. 

Rey is so busy staring at him that she stubs her toe, knocks the toothpaste off the counter, and then promptly steps on the tube, spraying a smear of Colgate across the bathroom tiling. 

When they lie together in bed, Andrew brushes an errant strand of hair from her face, and whispers _tell me about yourself._

When it comes to evoking nostalgia, people say that smell is the most powerful sense, but in this instant, Rey hears Kylo in his voice, and is instantly transported backwards through time. In her mind, she’s sitting back at Dutch Boy Burger, smelling the cooking oil and the sizzling bacon, biting into her bacon baby blue burger, and listening to the metallic clanking of pinball machines in the background. Kylo is smiling a wide and ferocious smile at her, his black eyes heavy and opaque, and they are fierce, and they are _fire_ , and she feels the jolt of awareness straight through her skin, absorbed into her bloodstream like a needle into flesh. Things that enter the body in this way include: heroin, crack, opioids. Medication designed to take away various pain. Shots to prevent serious illnesses. And also Kylo’s gaze.

 _Tell me about yourself_ , fictional Kylo says, his body curving towards her.

Rey closes her eyes and bites back the tears.

+++

A year later, Finn calls Rey with big news — _Coach_ has just assigned him a soulmate. Rey curls her fingernails into her arm, watching as they leave crescent shaped marks in the bend of her skin.

“I’m so happy for you! What’s she like?”

“Perfect,” Finn answers, almost-too-quickly, his words tripping over themselves. “She’s amazing. Her name is Christiana. She has the most beautiful curly dark hair and vivid green eyes. She’s 28 years old. She loves to sing. Her favorite food is meatballs. She works in marketing —”

“God, stop, please,” Rey cuts him off, alarmed. “Beyond what she does for a living and what food she likes to eat, how does she make you _feel_?”

“Amazing,” Finn says, again, too fast. “She makes me feel amazing. I’ll admit, before I met Christiana, I was a little doubtful of _Coach_. I thought, how can some sort of inanimate object accurately predict the love of my life? But it turns out _Coach_ was right all along. And Rey, I’m sure it’ll match you up with your soulmate soon too.”

Rey stops digging her fingernails into her flesh. Instead, she wedges a nail into her mouth, savagely ripping it off with her teeth, exposing a raw edge of cuticle. Blood wells up underneath the tender skin. 

“When’s the wedding?” she asks. “Assuming I can bring Andrew?”

“The wedding’s set for this June. And of course.”

Both phone lines fall silent. Speak of the devil — Rey watches through a crack in the door as Andrew neatly arranges the newspapers into a pile on the kitchen counter, making sure the edges match up nicely. He is always doing this. He spends his days at the hospital mopping up blood and sewing organs and disinfecting skin, and then he comes home and takes out the recycle and the trash, waters the plants that Rey forgets are living things, and throws out the expired cheese in the refrigerator. He makes love stoically. He never complains about anything, and sometimes Rey wants to scream at it for him. _Goddamnit, be messy_ , she wants to yell, _express emotion, be vulnerable, be raw, be anything other than this perfect robot with perfect hair and perfect teeth and an endlessly even temper who makes me feel incompetent at every turn._

 _If Kylo were here it would be different,_ she thinks before she can stop herself, _he’d vent about his day. He’d leave the trash where it is to kiss my spine and hold my hand. Maybe we’d argue. Maybe we’d yell. But it would be because we feel deeply about things._ Thinking of this reminds her of a poem she read once in high school, Dylan Thomas’s _Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night._ It’s meant to be a strong invocation for humans to live boldly and fight, an instruction to burn with life. This sense of passion is the exact thing that Leia has worked to eradicate, through the implementation of _Coaches_ and walls and executions and widespread fear tactics. 

_But to be human is to rage,_ Rey thinks, _to rage, rage, against the dying of the light._

“Hello? Bueller?”

“I’m still here,” Rey reassures him. And then, “Will … _he_ be there?”

Finn's answering silence is so loaded that she can almost feel his eye roll through the phone. “Honestly. You’re acting like a child. Yes, Kylo will be there, but there will be a ton of people, you’ll be seated at opposite ends of the room and odds are you guys won’t even see each other.”

She seriously doubts _that_. 

“Look, I get that you love Connecticut now. I’m happy for you that the writing career has taken off, and that you’re happy with Andrew. But it’s been over two years now, and it was kind of strange the way you just left in the first place. And also that you changed your number and didn’t want me to tell Kylo where you were. I mean, Manhattan is a city of six million people. What’d you think — that you were just going to run into him on Park Avenue or something?”

Rey scoffs. “Whatever. Like I’d ever be caught dead strolling down Park Avenue.” 

Finn has known her too long to fall for her attempt at deflection. “You guys were only together for like three days,” he says. “That’s really not a big deal in the scheme of things. I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me about Kylo.”

Rey’s heart jolts. She bites another nail, and it _hurts_. It’s a leftover habit from childhood, one that two different foster parents told her was disgusting. She learned to curb it when she got older, the same way she learned to curb other things: her loneliness, her sadness, her tendency to speak her mind in inappropriate situations. 

She doesn’t speak her mind in this situation either. She remembers Leia, in her blood red dress, with her cold eyes and pale hands. Leia, who may be human, but who displays starkly animal instincts — a wolf baring her teeth, a lioness fiercely defending her cub. Or her pride. Or the whole damn Sahara. 

Rey is learning that underneath everything, humans are intrinsically fragile creatures, as breakable as glass. Take away people's jobs, social statuses, mortgages, eyeliner, sexual preferences and 401Ks. Reduce people down to their most primitive instincts. What is left? Only a species roiling with pure, undiluted emotion: fear, anger, sadness, hate, love. 

In the end, humans are only animals, just trying to survive, trying to pretend that there isn’t another, bigger, predator coming to devour them whole.

+++

The wedding takes place at the Garrison, in the late afternoon.

In front of spectacular, north-westerly facing views of the Hudson, the happy couple kiss under a pergola intertwined with artfully placed sprigs of ambrosia, roses and gloxinia. Gloxinia means _love at first sight_. Rey seriously doubts this, since this marriage has been dictated by an entirely unromantic algorithm, but she claps along with everyone else, while they link arms and prance down the aisle, beaming. 

Finn looks ecstatic. Amid a shower of rose petals, he and Christiana feed each other pieces of vanilla cake. The guests laugh when Christiana’s cheeks are smeared with frosting. Finn has icing on the top of his nose.

Rey’s stomach rumbles noticeably. At her side, Andrew places an arm around her waist, asking solicitously, “Hungry? We’ll have dinner soon. Make sure you eat plenty of food if you plan on drinking.”

Rey is annoyed. “I’m not hungry,” she lies. 

Dinner is a choice between salmon and duck. Rey likes neither of these options. She gets two servings of salad, gorges on breadsticks, and drinks three glasses of champagne, ignoring Andrew’s warning glances sideways and not-subtle nudges to her ribs. Emboldened by the alcohol, she heads out to the dance floor after the band starts to play, gyrating wildly to Kelly Clarkson’s _Love So Soft_.

Andrew is somewhere behind her, finishing up his duck (he eats duck; he eats _everything_ ) when a pair of dark eyes fuse with Rey's across the room, scorching everything with the misfortune to be caught in their line of sight. Every single thing about the moment disintegrates into shards of white heat. Rey’s blood turns to ice. She _freezes_ — another animal response, something mammals do to assess danger situations before they make a move. The she runs. 

“What’s happening? Where are you going?” Andrew calls after her as she hurries off the dance floor. 

“Lipstick emergency,” Rey invents wildly, flapping a hand over her shoulder. “Be right back.”

She is not wearing lipstick. She is not a lipstick girl. She has never worn lipstick in her damn life.

+++

Enamored as he is by his new bride, besotten as he is by her curls, her eyes, her darkly seductive mouth — tonight painted a bright shade of red — Finn cannot miss Rey running off the dance floor. He also cannot miss Kylo throwing his napkin on the floor and cutting through the crowd like a slice of dark energy.

He remembers how, in chemistry class, he learned that color is perceived through either emission or absorption. A red shirt looks red because the dye molecules in the fabric absorb violet light. Other things, like lasers, are colorful by emission. The trick to distinguishing between the two is darkness. If you can see the color in the dark, then it is emitting light. 

Outside the windows of the ballroom, the sky is slowly darkening to dusk. Watching Kylo burn with energy after Rey is the purest form of color Finn has ever seen, brighter than the world’s reddest shirt. 

Against all odds, against a ruling system that unequivocally states that Kylo and Rey _should not, could not_ be together, Finn thinks, _how can something as beautiful as true love be so wrong?_

+++

Kylo catches up with Rey in front of an indoor fountain, replete with bubbling jets of water, soaked rose petals, and the pennies of a thousand aimless wishes. His fingers graze her arm.

“Are you real?” he whispers. “Do you know how long I looked for you?” It is too raw, his voice, but he doesn’t know how to tide back the longing. In the dim lighting, her eyes are huge and frightened. He wants to tell her how for so long, he looked for her in every girl on the street, in every late night cocktail waitress and every shitty _Coach_ hookup, and how all the girls were only pale reflections of her face. Instead, he says, stupidly, “I didn’t know where you were. I … went to your old apartment looking for you. I called, but the number was disconnected.”

Rey runs shaking fingers through her hair. It’s longer than he remembers from before, brushing against the small of her back, instead of barely bypassing her shoulders. She's done something to it as well, lightened the ends to a softer, caramel color. Her dress is midnight blue, dipping boldly across her chest and clinging to her hips and waist, before falling in a sheer curtain to her ankles. He can see the outline of her legs through the thin fabric.

“I’m sorry,” Rey says, very faintly. “I know that what I did was shitty. I can’t tell you why. I can only tell you that I had no choice.”

In this moment, Kylo does not care about her reasoning. He only cares that she is standing in front of him, blood pumping in her face and flushing her cheeks. 

The amygdala, the old, primitive part of the brain that developed millions of years before the other parts that regulate logical thought and reasoning, is responsible for intense feelings of fear, pain and pleasure. Triggered by Rey’s close proximity and his intense feelings for her, his amygdala is currently going haywire, resulting in a surge of adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream. Adrenaline increases body heat, as well as heart and breathing rate. 

So now, he is panting and sweating. 

“I don’t care about what happened. I only care that I want you back in my life. Rey … I think about you every fucking day,” he confesses hoarsely. And then he crosses the distance between them — negative space, it’s called in drawing, and he thinks this is so fitting, because any space between them is a negative thing — and he kisses her. 

Miraculously, Rey melts against him. Her hand rests on his, outlined against her stomach. She moves his palm to cradle her her ribs, then down to feel the ridge of her hipbone underneath the dress. Her fingers are asking Kylo’s fingers to feel her, and he is instantly dizzy with the shape of her. Her mouth sucks away his breath, but he returns the favor, and they use up each other's airways in the most intimate way possible. He doesn’t want her body to stop touching his, doesn’t want her mouth to leave. But then she pulls marginally away, and he strokes her hair with his free hand, sucking her bottom lip between his teeth with a harsh _pop_ before they separate.

She stares at him, her mouth red and full and lush.

“Rey,” he tells her, “I love you.”


	9. Chapter 9

Three Januarys ago, winter in New York City plummeted past the single digits and hovered precariously just under zero degrees Fahrenheit. Manhattan’s population went almost entirely into hibernation, with only a few people visible on the streets at a time, almost indistinguishable underneath huge ski jackets, their heads bowed down and eyelashes crusted with ice. 

Finn came over to Rey’s apartment in Brooklyn and promptly flipped the TV to HBO, humming tunelessly along to _Game of Thrones_ ’ theme song, while he brought water to boil in a saucepan. 

“I saw this on Youtube,” he told her when she asked, “apparently boiling water evaporates when it makes contact with freezing air. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

Rey opened her mouth, but her sarcastic retort died when she saw how Finn’s eyes were sparkling, and how his face was full of a bright, open curiosity. “Alright,” she said instead, watching smoke spiral up from the pan, “let’s see it then.”

Leaving the water bubbling on the stove, Finn heaved open the window to the fire escape and the cold surged through the tiny room like something alive and angry. Outside, everything was white and dark and frozen, a kaleidoscope of winter colors. 

“Ready?” he asked.

Rey nodded, clambouring outside after him with the pan, shivering violently. The air bit through her sweatshirt like a knife, piercing through her ribs and sadistically palming her frozen cheeks. 

“3, 2 … 1!” Finn counted down. Then he threw up the saucepan, and all that water turned to steam in seconds, so that Finn and Rey were standing outside in sweatpants on a rickety fire escape, smiling at something they knew was science, but felt like magic.

+++

Kylo is on fire, his eyes dark, his cheekbones carved from glass, everything about him stunning, raw, captivating.

Kylo says, Rey, _I love you_ , and all Rey can think about is that moment on the fire escape, watching a liquid instantly evaporate to a gas. She never knew that she could relate to the crumbling of an entire molecular structure until now.

When water changes to a gas, the molecules go flying apart, no longer able to be contained. Love is like that too. It’s like yanking at a loose thread in a sweater, popping open seams, loosening knots, undoing everything that once held you together. At the time, it feels like a beautiful, intimate opening up of yourself to the world — later, you see the tangle of threads at your feet and realize that while once you were whole and self-contained, now you are undone. 

_Undone_. That’s a really good word for what she has become, an excellent word to convey how Kylo has robbed her of breath and driven her to her knees. 

+++

Rey is crying. Of all the things he wanted, it wasn’t fucking _this_.

“Rey,” Kylo says helplessly, reaching for her, wiping a tear from her cheek. He exhales. His lungs simultaneously feel too big and too small for his body. “Please don’t cry. Please stop.”

If anything, she cries harder, and he thumbs his fingers through his hair, at a complete loss for what to do. He grasps her hips, drawing her closer, and stares into her wide hazel eyes, vivid with moisture. “I’m not going to leave you,” he tells her roughly, the gravity of what he is saying washing over him like high tide waves, “OK? I love you. I don’t care what _Coach_ says. I don’t fucking care anymore.”

The weight in his words drags them down, down, into the bottom of the fountain where they nestle with all the other pennies and promises. Maybe she senses that, because abruptly, she stops crying. 

“I love you,” he says again, his voice breaking on the word _you_. He keeps one hand at her waist, while the other moves up to cup her face. She stares at him with huge, blown out pupils. He watches her mouth soundlessly mouth the words, _I love you too_.

Her skin is hot, crowding up against him, smudging underneath his fingertips like wet paint. Her dress is so painfully thin and sheer that he can see the entire outline of her body underneath it, and he remembers … how it felt to kiss her, how she would stretch and move and loosen, how her mouth would open in a broken, noiseless gasp.

Both of the _Coaches_ at their waists wail a sonorous warning, their voices synchronized in perfect harmony with each other, but neither Kylo nor Rey move. Footsteps — 

A tall blond man in a tux is running towards them, eyes alight with hostility. He takes in the tears glistening on Rey’s cheeks, her close proximity to Kylo, and the sounds their _Coaches_ are making, before positioning himself lightly in between the two of them, his hands outstretched in warning.

“Rey,” he says, his calm voice at odds with the expression in his eyes, “do you know this man?”

The blood is hammering in Kylo’s head like a war drum. “And you are?”

“Rey and I are together,” the blond man tells him, linking his fingers with hers in an unmistakable gesture of possession, “we’ve been matched.”

Kylo _snarls_ like an animal, like a wolf with hackles up, low and deep in his throat. The strange man is staring at him, head cocked and eyebrow raised in both defiance and confusion, but he doesn’t know Kylo, not _really_ , not like Rey does, who senses what he’s about to do a second before he actually does it. She screams, “Kylo, _no_ —”

But he’s already leapt, catching the man by the elbow, slamming him into the wall behind them. His head makes a sickening crack, but he adjusts fast, stunned, rolling instinctively to the ground, trying to get back up to his feet.

Kylo won’t let him. His whole body is full of a swirling, furious energy that pulses in his head, beats in his veins and demands a furious release. He ducks a clumsy blow, plants a fist squarely to the kidney, spins, and lands another palm strike to the underside of the man’s jaw. He crumples like a sack of potatoes, eyes immediately glazing over. 

Kylo keeps him upright, holding his head up by the hair, and lands a series of rapid-fire punches to the face. His fist makes contact to the man’s nose with a sick popping sound.

Somewhere behind him, he hears Rey scream, but he doesn't stop.

+++

Kylo attended Columbia University, majoring in economics. During his freshman year, he was suspended for a full month after beating a fellow classmate bloody. The classmate’s name was Hux; in an ironic twist of fate, they would later go on to become friends.

Afterwards, Kylo’s shrink asks him, _What made you do it?_

Kylo stares out the window. It is early morning, and the grounds of Central Park are covered in a thin sheet of ice, like glittering tinsel, like a present waiting to be unwrapped. He picks at his fingernails and considers a myriad lies, before settling on the truth. 

“I was angry,” he says without flinching. 

The shrink nods. “You accept the emotion,” he tells Kylo. “That’s good. That’s a progressive step.”

But it doesn’t feel progressive. His anger feels like something ancient and dark and evil. It feels like something from the days of gladiatorial Rome, when warriors hacked each to pieces in an arena while the rest of the city cheered and a _thumbs up_ or _thumbs down_ meant the difference between life and death. It feels primitive, like cavemen beating each other with clubs. It feels evolutionary, like prowling wolves stalking prey in the snow, full of the desperate need to eat, to survive. 

Once, on the Discovery Channel, he watched a segment where a lioness protected her cubs against against an elephant and got her jaw ripped off in the process. She’d simply laid down and waited to die, her mouth hanging open awkwardly, bits of tongue and teeth and fur scraping against the ground.

 _Nature can be cruel_ , a disembodied voice had narrated dispassionately, _without the ability to eat or hunt prey, the lioness accepts that death is near._

 _Humans are predators too_ , Kylo thinks, watching the TV. _But when did we stop stalking our prey?_ The trappings of his fancy apartment encircle him like a vise. _Maybe_ , he thinks, staring at his expensive collection of vinyl, and kicking his feet against thousands of dollars worth of mahogany floorboards, _it was when we tricked ourselves into thinking that we were civilized_.

+++

“Do you want to talk about it?” Andrew asks Rey two mornings later, back in their shared apartment in Connecticut.

His nose is broken. She still has trouble looking at him head on, because the lattice work of bruises marring his cheekbones remind her too much of Kylo’s fists, and thinking of Kylo’s fists remind her of Kylo’s hands, and of his _mouth_ —

Some of the bruises are deep purple, while others are yellow and some are light green, speaking to the simultaneous timeline of pain and healing. 

Rey takes a sip of her tea. “No I don't,” she admits. Maybe she might have made more of an effort, once, but _Coach_ has the expiration date of their relationship set for two weeks time, and she can't bring herself to fucking care about much of anything anymore. 

Her fingers slip a little on the handle of her mug with that subconscious thought. _I don't fucking care anymore_. 

Andrew’s face shadows, revealing another chink in his no-longer impassive armor. Rey avoids his gaze. What she _should_ care about is the ominous cutout she'd received in the mail the other day, that of an old guillotine silhouetted against a bloodred skyline. White lettering across the top of the page screamed _Le tricolor de la révolution_ , above a basket full of ghostly white severed heads, red blood just beginning to dry underneath lips that had already turned blue. 

_Red, white, blue. Liberté, fraternité, égalité_.

The cutout wasn't signed, but if the creepy picture wasn't enough of a dead giveaway, the words scrawled on the back side of it — _you should have listened to me_ — certainly were. _Where exactly_ , Rey wanted to snap through her fear, _had Leia even dredged up such a twisted picture of the French revolution?_

She’d torn the image into a thousand scraps of paper, and then burned the trash in the field behind the apartment. Over the top of the irrigation ditch, the burning paper sent up smoke in fat, blooming clouds that obscured the stars.

+++

In Minnesota, flowing not too far from the northern shore of Lake Superior, the Brule River hits a divide as it travels through a cluster of volcanic rock. To the east, a waterfall cascades down into a pool, eventually meeting up with the larger lake. But the western fork seemingly pours into nothingness. Nicknamed the “Devil’s Kettle” by locals, the rocky void offers no explanation as to what’s going on or below the surface. For years, people have been trying to solve the mystery of the bottomless waterfall by dropping ping pong balls into the pothole and pouring in paints and dyes in an attempt to trace the water flow.

But nothing has worked. That water could be disappearing into the center of the earth’s core and no one would know. 

Rey hugs her body with her arms. This is how she feels too: full of bottomless, untraceable depths. Where has all her anger and fear gone? She doesn’t know. Maybe she swallowed it. Now, only a great emptiness consumes her. 

At night, over a dinner of grilled chicken, quinoa and Caesar salad, Andrew asks her if everything is OK. “You haven’t seemed like yourself lately,” he offers, in limp explanation. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Rey responds, spearing a tomato in the salad and watching juice and seeds spurt across her plate in a violent volley. _Nothing_ is eating away at her insides, clogging up her arteries and drying out her voice. “I’m totally fine.”

Andrew looks at her with ocean marbled eyes. They aren’t muddied brown with shadows, like hers, or black and volatile like Kylo’s. The clarity of them is staggering. “You can tell me,” he says. “If it’s something to do with that man from the wedding. He won’t hurt you. I’ll protect you.”

 _That man_. Rey’s fork scrapes across her plate. She takes a deep breath and misses Kylo and swallows a thick bite of chicken, and says, “So are you moving out of this apartment, or am I?”

“Well, we still have another week and a half together.”

Rey shrugs one skinny shoulder. “Better to be prepared.”

Andrew says, “It’s a shame this thing between us has to end.”

Rey gnaws at her bottom lip, her smile wry. “Ah, but end it _must_.”

Andrew is the consummate gentleman, the perfect citizen. Even the creases around his eyes are charming. He tells her, “Don’t worry about it; I’ll move out. I’ll take the couch and the glass table, but you can keep the other furniture.”

That glass table he refers to so casually is worth almost five thousand dollars, but Rey doesn’t care. No doubt, she would have left rings on it with her tea mugs, and maybe even smashed it eventually. She thinks how the fine glass shards would have been almost impossible to see, how she would have cut up the bottoms of her feet trying to sweep them up.

+++

_Coach_ has dictated that Rey and Andrew's relationship last for a year and a half.

Logically speaking, you should have more memories of someone the more time you spend with them, but while time is an objective concept, memories are not. A year and a half is plenty of time — but already, Andrew's memory is beginning to fade from Rey’s mind like water slipping through cupped hands. 547 days of her life have vanished like _that_ , with a snap of her fingers. 

She was with Kylo for three days, and yet, she thinks she will always remember it, like something scorched into the backs of her eyelids, like the color parts of _The Wizard of Oz_.

+++

Following the wedding fiasco, it takes every single bit of clout that the Skywalker-Solo name possesses to get Kylo out of trouble. Leia does what she does best, wheeling and dealing with city officials to convince them that Kylo’s crime was one of stupidity, rather than passion.

On Sunday, in her penthouse in the sky, she waits for her son. She imagines how he will sidle into her living room, repentant and grateful. She imagines how she will slap him for his sins, how her open palm will leave a red mark across his white skin. 

She _waits_ , her breath so icy cold that it leaves little wakes of frost in the air when she breathes, but Kylo never comes.

+++

For over a week and a half, Kylo forgoes food in lieu of drink, working late nights to close a deal at work.

He has 37 missed calls from his mother, none of which he intends to reciprocate. Eventually, he knows, she’ll just show up at his apartment — to avoid her, he uses a pseudonym and rents out a suite at the Plaza indefinitely. At night, he watches New York City flash across the windows, all gunmetal and black glass, a kingdom of skyscrapers so bright that it blots out the stars. 

He washes his face in the porcelain sink and stares at his reflection in the softly-lit bathroom mirror. Blood vessels in his eyes have popped, leaving them red and wounded. 

He helps himself to tequila in the mini bar. Every morning when the sun rises, he is surprised that a new day decided to dawn.

+++

On the third week of avoiding his mother, Kylo knows it can’t last. When his _Coach_ chimes in his pocket, he somehow suspects it is Leia’s doing.

“What is it?” he roars at the machine, his voice deadened, his heart even more so. “Which girl are you going to sadistically force me to fuck this time?”

 _Coach_ tells him, “Congratulations Kylo. Your ultimate match has been identified. Your pairing day is tomorrow. Tomorrow you will be coupled with your ultimate match.”

Kylo’s heart jumps to his throat, beats underneath his tongue, folds itself over and over like a crazy version of origami. “Is it someone I already know?” he asks raggedly, his last, desperate hope.

“Negative. But prior to pairing day, you have been allocated a short farewell period with an individual of your choosing. Data shows this can help to provide psychological closure.”

“Rey,” Kylo yells into the device. “Rey, Rey. I choose Rey!”

 _Coach_ whirrs and beeps, its buttons blinking red. “I’m sorry. That option is no longer available to you.”

“ _Motherfucker_ ,” Kylo screams helplessly. He fills the bathroom sink up with the hottest water his skin can stand, plugs the drain, and drops _Coach_ in. Then he calls Finn. 

Finn picks up the on the third ring. “Kylo?” he says, his voice sleepy. “It’s almost one in the morning.”

Kylo is shaking. The muscles of his arms are corded tight and taut, so close to the surface of his skin that purple veins are bulging alarmingly. He says, “I need a favor.”


	10. Chapter 10

The girl in the bar is wearing a black crop top and silver stilettos, her abs on full display, glitter haphazardly smeared in the direction of her belly button. She licks bubblegum pink lips and bites at the tip of her margarita straw suggestively. 

She is staring hard at Luke Skywalker-Solo, who is staring slack-jawed down at his iphone.

After a full thirty seconds of watching his screen light up, he opts to take the call. “And what could _you_ possibly want?”

“Hello to you too, brother.” Siloed behind lines of static, Leia’s voice is even colder than he remembers, worlds removed from the little girl who’d once screamed herself awake from recurring nightmares. Back then, he’d promised her, _tell me what happened and I will protect you; I will fight off all your enemies with my bare hands_. But that had been then, and this was now. 

The last time Luke had seen Leia, she’d displayed absolutely no reaction to the execution of a fifteen year old girl. Later that same day, Luke had tested his capacity for feeling by poking the edge of a knife blade lightly along the inside of his wrist, relieved to see that he still bled, even when he was _this level_ of numb inside. Then he drank a blue slushy and promptly vomited into one of Leia’s ceramic pots. “Maybe,” he’d confessed to his twin sister, “we’re doing something wrong here. Maybe this whole _Coach_ system is just a little too fucked up, even for us.”

When she looked at him, her distant expression had shifted, to be replaced by something tight and furious. “There isn’t room for weakness in this world,” she’d told him, “if you’re not with me, then you’re against me.”

(In the beginning, he and Leia had wanted to fix things, but maybe humans were just incapable of righting wrongs. They’d had only the best intentions, but what is that thing people say about intentions again? Oh yeah. _The road to hell_ …) 

Once he left New York, Luke found that it was easier to forget about his own failures while lounging around Venice Beach. Mostly, weed helped take the edge off things. He smoked joints and watched Lakers games and stared out the window at the way water and sky met in the middle of the world: a vast, swirling spill of blue interspersed with wisps of clouds and white sea foam. 

Back here in the bar, Tom Petty pounds across the stereo system, crooning about Mary Jane and last dances.

“Where are you?” Phone-Leia demands. “Are you out?”

“Uh-huh.” Luke makes eye contact with the bartender and waits for Leia to get to the point, aware that his sister would never call without wanting something. 

She doesn’t disappoint. “We have a problem. It’s Kylo.”

“Hmm,” Luke offers, noncommittal. _Is he surprised? No._ Luke wouldn’t wish the Skywalker lineage on his worst enemy. Skywalkers have always burnt a little too brightly for the rest of the world, often imploding as a result. Kylo is no exception to the rule. 

Leia hisses, “It’s becoming that _thing_ we always talked about. He’s becoming Anakin. I need you to come home immediately to help me deal with this.”

Luke rubs his forehead. It’s always Anakin, never _dad_. Very rarely do they even refer to Padme as _mom_. Logically speaking, Luke should have no memories of Padme and Anakin together, given that Padme’s life was ebbing away in the same seconds that he was breathing in his first gulps of air. 

But he dreams about the two of them together, and those dreams feel like memories, like snapshots of a life that actually happened. He sees Anakin brush the back of his hand across Padme’s cheeks. He sees his father smile at his mother with the kind of subtext you only get from lots of shared late nights and early mornings. When she looks at Anakin, his mother’s eyes are soft with happiness. 

Children process terror differently. Luke knows that Leia’s memories are very different. Where he imagines a love strong enough to support whole galaxies, Leia only sees the bloodshed that brought it crashing down. 

This is probably why she is the way that she is. And why he is the way that he is.

“OK,” he tells his sister, “I’ll come home if you need me to.”

+++

Rey is dreaming of an island at the edge of the world.

Wreathed in silvered mists and dripping underneath a near constant cloud cover, vivid green hills rise gently towards the heavens. Dew drapes itself over the ground in a shimmering, translucent blanket. Blue waves crash against the rocks, drenching a cluster of bright red poppies. The whole place is a study in color schematics, so far removed from the grime and grit of city life that it may as well be another planet. 

Lightning splits the sky apart, sending jagged purple streaks screaming across the horizon, followed by a distant boom of thunder. Rey is racing up to the top of the hill, shielding her face, rainwater stinging her eyes. Something is waiting here for her, if she is only brave enough to find it. Her legs burn; her breath scrapes against her throat. A trio of thorns catch her left hand as she races by, haphazardly splattering little droplets of blood.

Another angry welt of lightning. A huge boom of thunder—

Rey jerks free of the dream with a jolt that feels like falling fast and landing hard. On the dresser next to the bed, her phone is buzzing madly, vibrations propelling it back and forth against the wood.

When she answers, her voice is raspy and raw, like she spent it screaming. “Hello.”

“Don’t hang up.”

“Kylo?” She goes from being half asleep to awake in the space between seconds, the sensitive skin behind her ears and neck immediately goosebumping in reaction to his voice. “What are you … How did you get this number?”

“Persuasion. Please don’t hang up.”

Rey doesn’t even want to imagine what _that_ means. She clears her throat. “I’m not hanging up, but just so you’re aware of general boundaries and such, it’s 2 in the morning.”

“Just _please_ keep not hanging up.”

“I’m still here.” Rey presses the phone more firmly to her ear, as if through this inanimate object, and across a dream streaked metropolis, she can anchor Kylo to her. “What’s wrong?”

Into the soft shell of her ear, Kylo’s voice whispers, “Today, I was given my ultimate match.”

+++

Rey is from Greensburg Kansas, a town so small and suffocating that she grew up tripping over people everyday. Notable only for housing the world’s largest hand-dug well, Greensburg was responsible for forging two kinds of people: the ones who stayed and never left, and the ones who left and never came back.

Belonging to the latter category, Rey had outgrown the place before she ever hit puberty.

In 2007, Greensburg was devastated by an EF5 tornado. Traveling at twenty two miles long, the twister destroyed ninety five percent of the town, and killed eleven people. Rey was just a kid at the time, but she still remembers how the shredded awnings of Main Street had gaped like open wounds. The thing about tornadoes that hit at dusk is: you think somehow things will look better, less threatening in the daylight. 

But they don’t.

The city council passed a resolution mandating that all buildings be built to platinum status, and slowly Greensburg rose up again from the dust. But it was a different city now, forged from destruction — harder and steelier than it had been before — and similarly, Rey knows that the loss of Kylo will break her down, tear her apart and fundamentally alter her interior structure. 

She knows something else too, though — that in whole universe, there is nothing quite so strong as the human heart, which somehow shatters over and over again, and against all odds, lives on.

+++

At 3am, Kylo shows up at her door with two long stemmed red roses, so fresh, they still drip water.

“Where did you get these?” Rey asks when she lets him inside. She crosses her arms protectively around her body and stands awkwardly, realizing she doesn’t know what to do with her hands. “It’s too late for anything to be open.”

For a minute, Kylo only smiles, dispelling some of the bleakness behind his eyes. Intensity clings to him like another article of clothing, one he can’t peel off. “Would you believe me if I said I keep fresh flowers on hand, just in case I happen to run into you?”

Rey’s mouth quirks. “Bullshit.”

Kylo only shrugs, his eyes amused.

He moves into the kitchen and starts opening cabinets like he’s totally at ease, like he knows where everything is — despite the fact that he’s never been here before. Rey owns no vases, so Kylo fills a green tinted glass jar and deposits the flowers in the water. When he turns back to look at her, any lightness is gone. His gaze is heavy, hungry, weighted down with emotion. 

Basic social psychology theories tell us that some people get better looking the more we get to know them, with personality compensating for bad haircuts or stutters or any number of physical flaws. A whole other category of people get to coast through life on beauty, usually parlaying good genetics into short-lived Instagram modelling careers. 

But Kylo is neither of those things — Kylo _commands_ attention, dripping trails of charisma everywhere he goes. He is elemental, a force as raw as the one that siphons winds up into the Kansas sky; he sucks up the energy of every room, outshines every light source. 

(This has been known to happen before; some animals and plants are able to create their own light. In the Maldives, various species of phytoplankton are known to bioluminesce — when washed ashore by the tides, their chemical energy is converted into light. At night, these minucle organisms are responsible for turning whole beaches electric blue.) 

“I have to talk to you.”

Rey sidles away from the kitchen and folds her body into one of the high top bar chairs. “We can’t keep doing this,” she whispers, “this has to be the last time. It doesn’t matter how we feel. You’re matched now, and you know what happens to people who disobey _Coach_.”

“Fuck _Coach_ ,” Kylo says, his voice snapping. A muscle throbs in his jaw. “I don’t want to be with anyone that motherfucker thinks I should marry. Rey, I don’t think it’s real. I think it’s only a test.”

The image of a guillotine flashes across the back of her mind like smoke: there one second, gone the next. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean, I think _Coach_ is testing us. Do you remember the first time we met? How did you feel?”

 _How did she feel?_ She struggles to put just one word to that experience, so she opts for the most truthful thing she can think to say. “Alive. I felt alive.”

Kylo is nodding. He pulls up a chair next to her and sits down without breaking eye contact. “Yeah. Me too. It felt like something had locked into place. Almost like we knew each other, like we’d met before.”

“But that’s not possible.”

“I know.” Kylo rakes his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end. “I know it doesn’t make sense. I don’t believe in fucking reincarnation, or anything like that. But it feels like you and I … we’ve happened before and we’ll happen again. Like we’ve already happened a thousand times before and we’ll happen a thousand more. Like we’re inevitable.”

“Inevitable,” Rey echoes, touching a finger to his bottom lip. This, she understands. Her draw to Kylo is so powerful partly because a sense of familiarity dances between them — a familiarity so raw and potent that it borders on fate. Something deep and buried in her is deeply buried within him too. She understood that on a profoundly innate level before she was ever able to articulate it. “So you’re saying that all along, this world has only been fucking with us, just waiting to see when we’ll fight to be together?”

“Yes. Rey, I’m so…” Kylo breaks off, his eyes glinting with moisture. His feelings for her are raw, written across his face like they’ve been ripped straight from his chest. “Rey, I’m so _desperately_ in love with you. I don’t ever want to be without you.”

His gaze is like heat melting, a stare so visceral that she feels it as a physical touch. He looks at her and sees all of her: young, twenty-something skin, old eyes, splintered, aching heart. This is what she’s always wanted — her biggest, most secret dream — to be loved like this: body and soul, flaws and strengths, fears and hopes.

“Kylo,” she grinds out roughly, feeling herself begin to fall, as though from a great height. There’s a reason people call it _falling_ in love: because it’s a complete loss of control, because someone else makes you lose the ability to realize that plunging earthwards at lightspeed is never a good idea. “Do you even understand what you do to me?”

Kylo edges closer. He traces the curve of her mouth with his thumb, gently, reverently, filling the air around Rey until there’s nothing but the two of them, nothing but heat and sweat and current and electricity. “You,” he whispers, pressing the word into her skin letter by letter, “you are _all_ that I want in this whole fucked up world.”

He takes her hand, runs his fingers along the lines of her palm, the creases of her joints, the spot between her thumb and index finger. His touch is careful and tender, spreading goosebumps across her body.

Rey closes her eyes against his fingers, her skin flashing hot and cold at once. “But what,” she says, her voice breaking raggedly, “can we possibly do about this situation?”

And of all the things she’s not expecting, Kylo smiles.

+++

Luke stares at the trashed room of the Plaza Hotel, wondering how long the housekeeping staff has been adhering to the _do not disturb_ sign draped around the door handle. At least a few days, if this mess is any indication.

A collection of rumpled dress shirts lie atop each other in one corner. There are two empty glasses on the dresser, and a third full of dark liquid and half melted ice. He crosses the room, sniffing it experimentally, expecting whiskey, and getting .. some god awful concoction of randomly mixed liquors.

The bathroom is even worse. Half of the mirror is cracked, like someone smashed their fist into the glass. A rusty brown stain on the white floor tiling hints at dried blood. One of the sinks is full of lukewarm water, the drain plugged, a discarded _Coach_ bobbing around.

Luke pulls it out, dripping, between his thumb and forefinger. The fact that all _Coaches_ have built-in tracking devices isn’t public knowledge, but it is how Leia has been tracking dissenters for decades. It’s also how Luke happened to find this hotel room. 

Half hidden under the bed, the edge of a scratch pad is just barely peeking out onto the carpet. Luke stoops to pick it up, his eyes glazing over the dark black words, the scratch-outs, the way the pen has made a pulping of the paper and stabbed straight through the back cardboard. 

Rough sketches of bricks and mortar dot the corners of the paper, depicting an ever-rising wall. _MY CHOICE_ is written at the top in large block letters, underlined three times and circled twice.

+++

Leia spent her undergrad years studying polisci at Harvard. (Of course she did — she, the daughter of the twenty-first century’s most notorious serial killer, she, who was determined to right her father’s wrongs; it was something so poetic it belonged in a goddamn fairy tale. By the time she was seventeen, every school in the country was clamoring for her).

She never rushed for any sororities, but she still spent a lot of time in finals clubs, loitering around the Delphic and crashing various functions at the Spee. She curled her hair and bruised her face with makeup and contorted her body into dresses so tight, she couldn’t bend her knees. It wasn’t that she was looking for a man to take care of her — the opposite, in fact — it was that Leia Skywalker-Solo always got what she wanted, and what she wanted in this case, was to give herself plenty of options.

The first time she saw Lando Calrissian, it was punching season, and she was with a prospective initiative at the Fox. Bon Jovi was blaring in the room, the consummate _Livin’ On a Prayer_ that had everyone dancing and yelling and sloshing around half empty glasses of beer. Leia’s date, Boba Fett, was already wasted on weak-ass Miller Lite. Leia rolled her eyes in disgust, looked sideways, saw a fringe of dark hair, a pair of molten, laughing brown eyes and —

For her, in that moment, everything people said in all the storybooks and movies came true. The world stopped turning. The lights dimmed. Her breath caught. _The whole fucking shebang_. 

In the end though, the thing about Lando was that he came too easy: a naive little bunny coaxed to her serpentine smile. He was far too sweet. He fell into her bed that first night, and a hundred other nights after, without even a whimper. He never even resisted. There was all lover and no fighter in him. 

If Leia closes her eyes, she can still feel how his fingertips traced the nape of her neck, and tangled in the strands of hair there, how when he said _I love you so much_ , there was no guile, only truth to his expression. It pains her to think how much she wanted their life together to be true. How she’d almost considered demoting herself to housewife status, because it meant that she could wash the dishes and cook dinner and keep Lando caged up for herself. 

But a tiger does not pretend to be a kitten, and neither did Leia. In real life, there is no changing of stripes, or spots or polka dots, or whatever the goddam saying is.

The first time Leia saw Han, Millennium Falcon were playing at MSG. With her meteoric star already on the rise, she’d been offered backstage passes by the band, though didn’t much care about meeting them. Until the band started to play anyway.

They started with some crowd favorites, before warming up to their newest song, _All the Lonely Space Girls_. As soon as the electric guitar came in, Leia started to get a low, heavy feeling in her chest, like a humming. Her throat tightened, listening to a walking bass line that peaked and thrummed. She could feel it echo in her heartbeat. 

Han started to sing, rasping guttural melodies from the back of this throat. His eyes were closed, his mouth opened ravenously wide, like he was trying to fit the whole world between his jaws. 

And when he opened his eyes back up to look out over the crowd, his dilated gaze caught Leia’s, and held it. In a room full of twenty thousand people, a fire burned only between the two of them. He smiled at her, his hands raking up near the top frets, and the melody shrilled.

And Leia thought that while they might be strangers — they already knew each other intuitively, in their bones, in their blood. Because any man who could play the guitar with _that_ level of ferocity had to have some level of darkness in him.

(Too much darkness gets tedious fast though. There’s a reason why tortured musicians burn through significant others so quickly…)

Eventually, years of fierce arguments and power struggles landed Han and Leia’s marriage on the rocks. At that point, all life had to do was introduce some sort of catalyst (in this case, Kylo’s kidnapping), and then two angry, life-hardened people did the rest of the imploding themselves.

As _Coach’s_ creator, Leia was not bound to its dictations. In Han’s absence, she fed off a steady diet of casual sex, power and other people’s adoration. She brought beautifully sculpted men into her bed, wondering if their body heat would thaw her frozen heart — but she remained numb as ever. Sometimes, when they laid on top of her, she raked her long nails down the length of their muscular backs, checking to see whether the violence satisfied the holes punched inside of her chest — but it never did.

When they had gone, she washed her face, and sat on her bed, wondering why she was unable to cry over Lando and Han, the two men who ever meant anything to her.

+++

Too late, Leia realizes that Kylo is the only person who has ever come close to triggering her tear glands.

+++

Luke hunkers over the scratch pad, his fingers brushing past the wall of bricks to trace the viciously scribed lines of the word _choice_. He lowers his head.

 _My god, Kylo,_ he thinks, with nothing but sadness, _how we have failed you_. 

Ever the hardened politician, when Leia was first pregnant with Kylo, she’d viewed it as a way to boost public perception and morale. 

_Motherhood appeals to the masses in a way that power alone does not,_ she’d explained at one point during pregnancy, her upper lip curling. _Above all else, this baby is a political tool_. And Luke had wondered if she actually was as ice-veined as she made herself out to be. But it turns out that pregnancy hormones are no fucking joke. Luke had never believed in the powers of oxytocin until he saw the way Leia’s face softened when she looked down at her baby boy. 

As Kylo grew up, Luke and Leia spared no expense. There’d been private French and Spanish tutors, annual trips to Europe and the Maldives, elite boarding schools, a personal chauffeur, backstage passes to Kylo’s favorite musicians’ concerts — all the perks that money and fame afforded. Leia may have been emotionally stunted when it came to things like love and affection, but she tried so hard. More than anything, she wanted to give Kylo a life full of possibilities, free from everything she’d been forced to endure.

And yet — despite everyone’s best efforts, Kylo still grew up with rage in his heart and black shadows behind his eyes. 

+++

“Talk to me,” Leia snarls into the mouthpiece of her cell. “Give me some good news.”

On the other end of the line, Luke’s voice is slightly slurred, like it always is after he smokes. She hates what weed does to him. It slows him down, dulls his edges — and he’s already slower than her to begin with. _Keep up_ , she wants to admonish him, _we’re in this together, you and I. This is our world; everyone else is just living in it_.

“I wish it was better news, actually,” he says, “But Leia, I think Kylo’s gone to the wall.”

Leia feels the impact of his words hit her chest and stick in her skin like a burr. Her heart is beating itself bloody, hammering up against the barricade of ribs and sinew in her chest. The thought of losing Kylo is unfathomable; she can’t even articulate the pain of it. “How do you know?”

The line fills with static. “Saw it on a sketchpad in his hotel room,” Luke mumbles, sounding very far away.

Leia forces herself to think through the buzzing in her skull. Her skin feels stretched too tight, the beginnings of a migraine building behind her skull. “I imagine he fled to the closest border wall with Rey,” she spits out. 

Luke remains ineffably calm. “The closest one is in Maine. We’ll never get there in time.”

Leia has only been to a few of the borders walls. She doesn’t like visiting them because she doesn’t like to acknowledge pieces of the world that exist beyond the reach of her control. Once, in Montana, she’d craned her neck to look up at hundreds of feet of concrete and steel, wondering how someone could possibly be desperate enough to scale it. But she doesn’t have to wonder too much where Kylo is concerned.

“I’ll alert the guards,” she says, when she can speak again. “I’ll let them know to shoot Kylo and Rey on sight.”

Luke’s long silence is telling. “Leia, he’s your _son_. And she’s …. She’s just a girl.”

Leia’s voice is dark, so dark, and her words have bite and snarl and _teeth_. “Better Kylo really be dead than willingly gone from me forever.”

+++

Luke hangs up the phone on Leia’s threats. He thinks, _godspeed nephew. May your next life be far kinder to you than this one ever was_.

+++

From here, halfway up the wall, the world is black on black: dark sky, dark ground, the shadows of clouds rippling with hues of silver like mother-of-pearl. The crystalline tension in the air threatens rain, heralding a world waiting to be shattered, all buried living things rising to the surface once more.

Kylo throws his head heavenward, his face splitting wide with wild abandon, tasting freedom on his tongue.

+++

The bullets come from nowhere, pinging off the steel wall, ricocheting somewhere under Rey’s feet. Far, far below her, she can see only see the patrol from her peripheral vision, a fast moving blur of tiny, suited dots beelining for the base of the footholds.

“Kylo!”

“It’s OK.” Suspended just above her, he is calm and steady. “Just keep going. We have enough of a head start that they won’t catch us.”

The next bullet whizzes parallel to her body, so close she can feel the heat scorch by. Her breathing is so loud she can hear it echo in her own head. “Kylo!”

He stops, contorting his body to look back at her. He clasps her face in his left hand, his thumb hard against her cheekbone, holding her in place as he kisses her, so, so lightly and carefully, as if she is a dandelion that could scatter to the wind.

“Rey,” he tells her. “I love you. This is our time. This is you and me. This is our future together ahead of us. Don’t be afraid.”

She breathes in deeply, the previous twenty four years of her life rising into the air and dissolving like mist. 

“Do you trust me?”

She nods. 

“Keep climbing. And don’t look down.”

And so she does.


	11. Epilogue

There’s one really cheesy saying people like to splash across commercials and insert into colloquial conversations: _life isn’t about the number of breaths you take; it’s about the moments that take your breath away_.

In a lifetime, the average person will take a little under 700 million breaths, most of which they will barely even notice. But when Rey ascends the wall, she’s painfully, vividly aware of every single rush of air leaving her mouth and nose. 

She thought that the world beyond the wall would be some sort of uncharted forest, or vast wilderness — but instead, there’s no foliage here at all. Everything is black and bare, but for hundreds of other pairs of Kylos and Reys, each outfitted in different clothes and looking to be of varying ages. Some are kissing, some are talking quietly and intently. All of them have numbers bobbing above their heads: pair number 366, pair number 472, pair number 518. Closest to her, pair number 48 are locked in a passionate embrace. 

Rey looks skyward. She and her Kylo are number 998.

A cloud moves, and starlight skims off the edges of the wall, silvering Kylo’s eyes. “What the actual fuck?” he whispers.

And just like that, just then, Rey feels her body begin to dissolve, pulled upwards by some unseen, all powerful gravitational pull in reverse. Her hand automatically spasms, reaching instinctively for Kylo’s. “I love you,” she whispers. 

Even with his whole body shimmering into nothingness, his black eyes still blaze into hers. “I love you so much,” he says, his lips crackling and distorting like a hologram. “ _Nothing_ in this life can take that away.”

Rey breathes out, and the world explodes. A kaleidoscope of colors shatter the skyline, like a movie flashing by in fast forward, lights changing and receding at supersonic speed. A wave of gold flashes downward from the clouds, highlighting the barren ground.

Words blaze into existence above the top of the wall:

1000 Simulations Completed. 998 Rebellions Logged.

+++

_Present Day, New York City_

Loitering around the back of Tribeca’s Shigure, Adam Driver takes a sip of his sake and waits for his date, idly spinning his phone around in his hands.

He’s not really into dating apps, but ever since two of his friends met their now-spouses online, he’s decided to give it a try. He’s not sure exactly — he has no previous experience to base it on — but a 99.8% match seems like a pretty fucking high rating.

“Hi.”

He looks up, his gaze traveling over the nose ring, the dusting of freckles, the waterfall of brown hair, the hazel eyes. Her smile is blinding.

“I was looking for you. Adam, right? I’m Daisy Ridley.”


End file.
